I have done this analysis in detail, my suggestion: Appbase.io - Cheap, reliable and offers UI components like Algolia - 10 X frontend developer productivity.
Another option is SearchTap.io - Reliable and as Fast as Algolia, they don't have a custom UI library like Appbase and Algolia though.
When deciding on replacing Algolia, consider the following things:
1) Stage of the company :
- Before PMF - Go with Algolia and test your hypothesis
- When scaling Algolia may prove expensive - Our problem was we were on a shared cluster - Algolia sync sometimes took over 20 sec (Bad UX), the alternative was to pay $3000/month instead of $500 a month ( 1 million records across - Prod, Dev, Stage)
2) Are you using UI Artifacts provided by Algolia like InstantSearch?
Components like InstantSearch make it 10X easier to create UI's. Appbase has https://opensource.appbase.io/reactivesearch/
3) Do you need a UI to manage the Search cluster deployment?
Algolia UI for managing Indexes and other management-related functions - Analytics etc, Appbase has something called DejaVu which claims to be the missing UI for ElasticSearch - https://opensource.appbase.io/dejavu/
4) Availability of good backend SDKs
Algolia fas feature-rich (bulk insert, changing the permission of indexes etc) backend SDKs. For Bonsai and Appbase you can use the standard Elastic SDK for various languages.
ALERT: AWS Elastic Search lags 2 versions behind the Elastic search releases.
Thanks for recommending appbase.io @pkaura!
If you're looking in ElasticSearch's direction and want parity with Algolia's featureset (search relevancy, analytics, security), you should check us out. As Puneet mentions, ReactiveSearch (our open-source UI kit) is also the most popular way to building search UIs with ElasticSearch.
Appbase.io can work in a self-hosted / managed fashion along with any ElasticSearch hosting provider (we also provide a fully hosted option which includes ElasticSearch hosting).
Happy to answer any follow-ups @abhishek!
Algolia is not too expensive unless you are using in with very high traffic.
One of the best ways to reduce costs in search is to use ElasticSearch. You will need to do a bit of devops for maintenance, but other than that, ElasticSearch is very good as a search service, or even as a caching system.
AWS has a ElasticSearch service that will help reduce the maintenance load.
Alternatively you can use the cloud hosted ElasticSearch service from Elastic, the creators of ElasticSearch.
Thank you Forouzani. Bootstrapping with a lean team. So want to optimise both the cost and devops effort. I think Alogolia is the only viable option for now.
We are using Algolia here at Capiche too, the time savings are totally worth it when you are starting out.
You can always change in the future if your search system gets heavy traffic and the bill starts getting too big - at that point you should have more resources to invest in building your own search system with something like ElasticSeach.
Yes. Makes perfect sense.
Right now, we are just minimising the time spent on devops, so that we can focus on core-product. Heroku, S3, Cloudflare and Retool are such lifesavers.
If you are willing to self host, I used https://typesense.org/ and it did the job and was easy to setup.
Thank you for the mention @SebastienWae.
For others reading this, we just launched a public beta of a hosted version of Typesense based on popular demand: https://cloud.typesense.org.
It still runs the same open source version, so you can either choose to self host or we can help with hosting.
@jasonbosco Super cool, thanks for sharing! Neat to see you're using GitHub auth to login, too—that's one that's still far less common to see than say Google auth, but fits your target audience well.
Thank you Jackson. Your suggestion makes sense. MeiliSearch looks amazing.
I also found https://bonsai.io/
Hi Abhishek, I work at a search-technology startup called SearchTap.io that might fit your needs.
At sajari.com we’ve been re-thinking search from the ground up and will be releasing a completely new type of search engine in the next couple of months.
Our goal was to build a platform as fast as Algolia, but more powerful and flexible. We have the ability to version search configuration and run two (or more) configurations as an A/B test agains the same index, Algolia requires you to duplicate the entire index to do the same.
Furthermore we have reinforcement learning and personalisation capabilities built in. Although we’ve been focusing on website and ecommerce search, our long term goal is to make smart search experiences accessible to every organisation.
Feel free to reach out if you want to know more.
Sorry about the late reply @maguay. Right now our focus is on public-facing websites and e-commerce stores. But depending on your requirements, you can use Sajari for internal search as well. However, support for SSO, compliance, and other Enterprise capabilities aren't planned for another 12 months.
There is nothing to check out on the website. Just "Request Demo" call to action. I have no clue what is their offering.
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thanks for the detailed reply. :)