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Algolia

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Algolia vs Bonsai: What are the differences?

What is Algolia? Developer-friendly API and complete set of tools for building search. Our mission is to make you a search expert. Push data to our API to make it searchable in real time. Build your dream front end with one of our web or mobile UI libraries. Tune relevance and get analytics right from your dashboard.

What is Bonsai? Fast, reliable full-text search, managed for you by experts. Your customers expect fast, near-magical results from your search. Help them find what they’re looking for with Bonsai Elasticsearch. Our fully managed Elasticsearch solution makes it easy to create, manage, and test your app's search.

Algolia and Bonsai belong to "Search as a Service" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Algolia are:

  • Database search
  • Multi-attributes
  • Search as you type

On the other hand, Bonsai provides the following key features:

  • The Open Source Advantage- Our service is proudly powered by Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene, the open source industry standard for fast full-text search.
  • Results in Real-Time- Search your site's activity as it happens, with Elasticsearch's cutting-edge real-time updates
  • High Availability by default

Medium, StackShare, and Product Hunt are some of the popular companies that use Algolia, whereas Bonsai is used by Listium, Growstuff, and reclamador.es. Algolia has a broader approval, being mentioned in 258 company stacks & 54 developers stacks; compared to Bonsai, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

Advice on Algolia and Bonsai
Akhil Kumar Singh
software developer at arzooo · | 7 upvotes · 14.6K views

I want to design a search engine which can search with PAYMENT-ID, ORDER-ID, CUSTOMER-NAME, CUSTOMER-PHONE, STORE-NAME, STORE-NUMBER, RETAILER-NAME, RETAILER-NUMBER, RETAILER-ID, RETAILER-MARKETPLACE-ID.

All these details are stored in different tables like ORDERS, PAYMENTS, RETAILERS, STORES, CUSTOMERS, and INVOICES with relations. Right now we have only 10MBs of data with 20K records. So I need a scalable solution that can handle the search from all the tables mentioned and how can I make a dataset with so many tables with relations for search.

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Replies (1)
Christopher Wray
Web Developer at Soltech LLC · | 2 upvotes · 12K views

What e-commerce platform or framework are you using?

A lot of this depends on what your infrastructure already supports. Either of the options are a great choice so it comes down to what will be easiest to integrate and which search service is most affordable.

Elastic search is open source but you will need to configure and maintain it on your server. It may be more difficult to set up depending on the platform your app is built on.

Algolia has great documentation and is normally pretty easy to integrate but it can be pretty expensive.

I've never used Typsense but it seems like it would be a great option as well.

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Rana Usman Shahid
Chief Technology Officer at TechAvanza · | 6 upvotes · 369.2K views
Needs advice
on
AlgoliaAlgoliaElasticsearchElasticsearch
and
FirebaseFirebase

Hey everybody! (1) I am developing an android application. I have data of around 3 million record (less than a TB). I want to save that data in the cloud. Which company provides the best cloud database services that would suit my scenario? It should be secured, long term useable, and provide better services. I decided to use Firebase Realtime database. Should I stick with Firebase or are there any other companies that provide a better service?

(2) I have the functionality of searching data in my app. Same data (less than a TB). Which search solution should I use in this case? I found Elasticsearch and Algolia search. It should be secure and fast. If any other company provides better services than these, please feel free to suggest them.

Thank you!

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Replies (2)
Josh Dzielak
Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 8 upvotes · 274.1K views
Recommends
on
AlgoliaAlgolia

Hi Rana, good question! From my Firebase experience, 3 million records is not too big at all, as long as the cost is within reason for you. With Firebase you will be able to access the data from anywhere, including an android app, and implement fine-grained security with JSON rules. The real-time-ness works perfectly. As a fully managed database, Firebase really takes care of everything. The only thing to watch out for is if you need complex query patterns - Firestore (also in the Firebase family) can be a better fit there.

To answer question 2: the right answer will depend on what's most important to you. Algolia is like Firebase is that it is fully-managed, very easy to set up, and has great SDKs for Android. Algolia is really a full-stack search solution in this case, and it is easy to connect with your Firebase data. Bear in mind that Algolia does cost money, so you'll want to make sure the cost is okay for you, but you will save a lot of engineering time and never have to worry about scale. The search-as-you-type performance with Algolia is flawless, as that is a primary aspect of its design. Elasticsearch can store tons of data and has all the flexibility, is hosted for cheap by many cloud services, and has many users. If you haven't done a lot with search before, the learning curve is higher than Algolia for getting the results ranked properly, and there is another learning curve if you want to do the DevOps part yourself. Both are very good platforms for search, Algolia shines when buliding your app is the most important and you don't want to spend many engineering hours, Elasticsearch shines when you have a lot of data and don't mind learning how to run and optimize it.

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Mike Endale
Recommends
on
Cloud FirestoreCloud Firestore

Rana - we use Cloud Firestore at our startup. It handles many million records without any issues. It provides you the same set of features that the Firebase Realtime Database provides on top of the indexing and security trims. The only thing to watch out for is to make sure your Cloud Functions have proper exception handling and there are no infinite loop in the code. This will be too costly if not caught quickly.

For search; Algolia is a great option, but cost is a real consideration. Indexing large number of records can be cost prohibitive for most projects. Elasticsearch is a solid alternative, but requires a little additional work to configure and maintain if you want to self-host.

Hope this helps.

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Decisions about Algolia and Bonsai

We originally had used Algolia for our search features. It's a great service, however the cost was getting to be unmanageable for us. Algolia's pricing model is based around the number of search requests and the number of records. So if you produce a large number of small records the price can quickly get out of hand even if your actual dataset doesn't take up that much space on disk. Spikes in internet traffic can also lead to unexpected increases in billing (even if the traffic comes from bots)

After migrating to Typesense Cloud we have been able to save A LOT of money without losing out on any of the performance we got from Algolia. I do not exaggerate when I say that our overhead for search is less than 25% of what it used to be. Typesense also has the following advantages:

  1. Their cloud offering lets you configure your Typesense nodes and specify how many you want to spin up. This allows you to manage costs in a manner that is way more predictable. (You basically pay for servers/nodes instead of records and requests)

  2. It's completely open source. We can spin up a cluster on our own servers or run it locally.

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Phillip Manwaring
Developer at Coach Align · | 5 upvotes · 35.5K views

The new pricing model Algolia introduced really sealed the deal for us on this one - much closer to pay-as-you-go. And didn't want to spend time learning more about hosting/optimizing Elasticsearch when that isn't our core business problem - would much rather pay others to solve that problem for us.

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Pros of Algolia
Pros of Bonsai
  • 126
    Ultra fast
  • 95
    Super easy to implement
  • 73
    Modern search engine
  • 71
    Excellent support
  • 70
    Easy setup, fast and relevant
  • 46
    Typos handling
  • 40
    Search analytics
  • 31
    Designed to search records, not pages
  • 30
    Distributed Search Network
  • 30
    Multiple datacenters
  • 10
    Smart Highlighting
  • 9
    Search as you type
  • 8
    Multi-attributes
  • 8
    Instantsearch.js
  • 6
    Super fast, easy to set up
  • 5
    Database search
  • 5
    Amazing uptime
  • 4
    Realtime
  • 4
    Github-awesome-autocomple
  • 4
    Great documentation
  • 4
    Highly customizable
  • 3
    Beautiful UI
  • 3
    Powerful Search
  • 3
    Places.js
  • 2
    Awesome aanltiycs and typos hnadling
  • 2
    Integrates with just about everything
  • 1
    Developer-friendly frontend libraries
  • 1
    Ok to use
  • 1
    Fast response time
  • 1
    Github integration
  • 1
    Smooth platform
  • 0
    Fuck
  • 0
    Giitera
  • 0
    Is it fool
  • 0
    Nooo
  • 2
    Free tier

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Cons of Algolia
Cons of Bonsai
  • 11
    Expensive
    Be the first to leave a con

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    What is Algolia?

    Our mission is to make you a search expert. Push data to our API to make it searchable in real time. Build your dream front end with one of our web or mobile UI libraries. Tune relevance and get analytics right from your dashboard.

    What is Bonsai?

    Your customers expect fast, near-magical results from your search. Help them find what they’re looking for with Bonsai Elasticsearch. Our fully managed Elasticsearch solution makes it easy to create, manage, and test your app's search.

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    What are some alternatives to Algolia and Bonsai?
    Elasticsearch
    Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
    Solr
    Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more. Solr powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.
    Swiftype
    Swiftype is the easiest way to add great search to your website or mobile application.
    Azure Search
    Azure Search makes it easy to add powerful and sophisticated search capabilities to your website or application. Quickly and easily tune search results and construct rich, fine-tuned ranking models to tie search results to business goals. Reliable throughput and storage provide fast search indexing and querying to support time-sensitive search scenarios.
    Klevu
    It is an intelligent site search solution designed to help eCommerce businesses increase onsite sales and improve the customer online shopping experience.
    See all alternatives