Introducing: A search & relevancy assessment from engineers, not theorists. Learn more
Comparison
Bonsai is the Algolia alternative that puts customers first. We’re the only managed Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and SolrCloud platform that provides the support of a search engineering team, but at a fraction of the cost.
No credit card required
Expert engineering support
Algolia is a proprietary, hosted, search-as-a-service product that works well if budget isn’t an issue. For more advanced implementations, developers can quickly implement Algolia. For founders and product managers, Algolia even has a no-code implementation.
From what we’ve heard from customers who switch to Bonsai with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, fast growing sites using Algolia quickly run into search & indexing limits that lead to expensive plan upgrades as they scale.
One architectural issue in particular that we’d like to highlight is that Algolia requires separate indices for each sort order, which counts towards your plan limits. Most of the index settings like fields to search, fields to facet, fields to group by, ranking settings, etc are defined upfront when the index is created versus being able to set them on the fly at query time.
Plus, there is very little customization for more advanced implementations. This approach has obvious tradeoffs that can’t be ignored if search is mission-critical to your product.
Algolia might be adequate enough to get the job done if search is an afterthought for your product. But if you’re looking for best-in-class platform and support, look elsewhere.
We’re not just some startup that’s all bark and no bite. Launched in 2012, Bonsai was the first hosted Elasticsearch-as-a-service on the market and the first OpenSearch-as-a-service provider to launch in 2021.
Algolia has pre-built integrations with many platforms like WordPress and Netflify. It also comes with 6 UI libraries that makes it easy to drop in a component and get going within minutes.
Algolia’s API leaves little to be desired with 14 clients and extensive documentation.
There’s no question that Algolia has carved out a strong market position in the ecommerce vertical. Pre-built integrations like Shopify and Salesforce take the load off data integration.
Bonsai is all-in on search. We live and breathe search infrastructure, relevancy, and bring decades of expertise to the table.
Bonsai has one of the only partnerships that allow for exclusive support of current versions of Elasticsearch.
Our proprietary multi-tenant platform architecture makes efficient use of resources so we can pass down savings to customers.
Get started with a free account and then upgrade your cluster anytime at a price a fraction of what Algolia charges. No hidden fees. No expensive overages.
Yep, seriously. We work with you to understand the best instances to deploy on and help you take advantage of preferential billing and Reserved Instances. You pay us to run search; you pay your cloud provider to run the computers. It’s that simple. Plus, make changes quickly without worrying about slowing down deployments.
There’s a reason companies at every scale switch to Bonsai for their search engines.
Before Bonsai:
Poor search performance & latency
Treading water fixing bugs
Growing technical debt
Major downtime
After Bonsai:
Build innovative search features
Fast & relevant search results
On-demand expert support
Peace of mind
Never deal with a yellow or red state again, because we fix it for you. Sleep easy at night knowing your end users enjoy superior search experience. Make changes and improvements to search without being afraid to break something or have to rewrite from scratch.
Save your team hundreds or even thousands of engineering hours.
You shouldn’t have to waste time on version upgrades, security and patch upgrades, or other upgrades that would otherwise cause breaking changes.
Separate clusters for production, staging, and development ensure zero downtime version upgrades
You can trust that your users will receive relevant results, reduced latency, and your search will never face an interruption. Less errors, less lost revenue, less customer support.
Increase search performance by up to 9x
Get closer to the actual search experience of end users with analytics to measure how successful searches were. Understand the full picture of how search is performing with direct integrations into your tech stack so you can improve hardware use, search upgrades, and query and index optimizations.
Debug minor search issues in half the time
Yep, seriously. We work with you to understand the best instances to deploy on and help you take advantage of preferential billing and Reserved Instances. You pay us to run search; you pay Amazon to run the computers. It’s that simple. Plus, make changes quickly without worrying about slowing down deployments.
Save up to 30% on hardware infrastructure costs
With over a decade of experience having built one of the first cloud search extensions, there’s nothing we haven’t seen. Instead of reading yet another blog post hoping to answer an urgent question, ask us instead and we’ll get right back to you with a thorough, personalized solution.
Our senior engineers have been working in search for a decade+
With playbooks and best practices tailored to your specific use cases and goals, our advisory solutions equip you to create value from search. You benefit from the lessons we’ve learned from managing hundreds of thousands of clusters for companies across all industries.
Advisory solutions are included at no extra cost with Enterprise plans
With our one-of-a-kind, fully managed service, you’ll have regular, consistent contact with us via multiple channels. When Bonsai is in your corner, it’s like adding a whole team of search experts to your staff — imagine a fractional Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Search Engineer, and Data Scientist at your fingertips.
Search works seamlessly through team turnover (even when the original engineer who set it up leaves)
Unlike the other guys, we take responsibility for every one of your clusters. Our team is constantly monitoring, optimizing, and enhancing your search experience, solving problems before you know they exist.
Neither Elastic Cloud or Amazon OpenSearch Service will proactively fix cluster issues for you
Search highly sensitive data without compromising security or performance. Bonsai partners with Titaniam to provide the industry’s most sophisticated encryption-at-work capabilities. And with the option to deploy to your own cloud, you can meet even the most rigorous compliance standards.
Everyone: SOC-2 + GDPR
Enterprise: FIPS-140-2 + HIPAA + PCI + CCPA
All Bonsai clusters are provisioned with a unique, randomized URL and have HTTP Basic Authentication enabled by default, using a randomly generated set of credentials. Under this scheme, it would take the world’s fastest super computer around 23.5 quadrillion years to guess.
All Bonsai clusters support SSL/TLS for encryption in transit. We use industry standard strength encryption to ensure your data is safe over the wire.
Bonsai clusters are provisioned on hardware that is encrypted at rest by default. In addition to Amazon’s physical security controls, this means your data is safe from physical theft.
All paid Bonsai clusters receive regular snapshots, which are stored in an offsite, encrypted S3 bucket in the same region as the cluster.
All Bonsai clusters are accessed via a custom-built, high-performance layer 7 routing proxy, and sit behind a tightly controlled firewall. This helps to ensure that the cluster and data are protected from port scans and unauthorized persons.
Bonsai can support IP whitelisting, and VPC Peering to users on single tenant clusters.
“We switched to Bonsai as our ES vendor...and have not had one moment of regret or issue with your excellent service. Both the technical platform and your support team have been a delight to work with. We are very happy customers.”
— Jason Taylor, TextUs
“We got more value from a discovery call with Bonsai than we did with a paid consultation with Elastic.”
— Engineer, Under Armour
“No one knows Elasticsearch better than Bonsai. We’ve been able to avoid hiring that expertise in-house because of the support that we’re getting with Bonsai.”
— Nathan Sprout, Head of Product
You shouldn’t have to waste valuable time and resources on costly maintenance, bugs, and downtime. With Bonsai, you can finally focus on what matters most: making meaningful improvements to the search experience of your users.
No credit card required
Expert engineering support
99.999%
last month’s uptime
1B+
daily requests served
20,000+
active clusters managed
