8 Best Elasticsearch Alternatives, Most are Free. Elasticsearch is one of the top search engine platforms in the market, and it gathers many satisfied users around the globe. However, some of them – and maybe you, too- might not find it useful to utilize. In that case, you may find a great benefit by using these Elasticsearch alternatives instead.
A search bar might seem like a little detail in every online service, yet it can make all the difference. Imagine you build a movie streaming platform with hundreds or thousands of titles without providing a search bar. There is a high chance that nobody will use that service. That is when Elasticsearch comes to your aid.
Elasticsearch is a Lucene-based search engine by Elastic company, and it was first launched in 2010. Elasticsearch’s strongest feature is the ability to do full-text searches. And due to that, major companies such as Adobe, Netflix, and Soundcloud use the service.
What Elasticsearch do is gather and transform the unstructured data to be structured, and it does so for a huge amount of data in almost real-time. Then, it stores and analyzes the data according to your need and aids you in building data visualization.
The verdict is you can trust Elasticsearch to be a data-management center and to help you build an effective data-driven strategy. Since it is an open-source platform, you can get Elasticsearch for free. However, for an extra fee, you will have access to useful features such as ransomware protection and searchable snapshots.
8 Best Elasticsearch Alternatives, Most are Free
In this article, you can know about Elasticsearch Alternatives here are the details below;
Despite the all-rounder features and attractive features, some may find that Elasticsearch does not suffice for their needs. Therefore, this article will find 8 tools to replace Elasticsearch. To start, check out the list below.
1. Typesense
Typesense is a product that was born from the frustration and curiosity of the co-founders, Jason Bosco and Kishore Nallan. Starting as a side-project, Typesense has strived from 2015 until today.
Typsense is one of the open-source alternatives to Elasticsearch, which means it also offers a search engine service. Typesense was built with developer productivity in mind. And it does so by providing an easy and intuitive design for the developers to use, all from the ground up.
However, Typsense’s main selling point is its speed. Typesense offers a way to bring the result in a fast manner by using in-memory indices. Due to that, the result will show up in 50 milliseconds, generally. Though it may take more for some cases, it is still what Typesense’s founders aim for.
Moreover, it also supports several useful features and characteristics. For example, it has a tolerance for typos, the ability to look for synonyms, and a result-sorting ability.
To get Typesense, you will not have to spend a dime, as it is an open-source tool. However, to provide a 360 experience, Typesense also offers you a hosting service called Typesense Cloud. The cloud is not free, though. But you can get some useful features just by paying an hourly fee.
2. Apache Solr
It is safe to say that Apache Solr is a head-to-head Elasticsearch competitor. It is because both share some similarities; one is the usage of Lucene as the base library, and the other is that both are free and open-source searching tools.
However, those are not the greatest things that Apache Solr offers. Unlike Elasticsearch, it also acts as a data storage and analytical tool. It crunches all kinds of data, be it unstructured, semi-structured, or structured data, to provide you with search results in an instant.
With many users around the globe, Solr ensures the availability of multilanguage text analysis tools. It offers a way to break down and analyze your data one by one, and it can also do complex processing such as regression and cluttering.
Solr makes several beneficial features available for you to complement all the key features. For example, you can sort, facet, and add pages to the search result. Moreover, there is also an auto-suggest, spell-checking, and even geospatial search for better analysis.
Solr offers you a stable and easy-to-use platform. That is why getting Apache Solr might be the best choice if you do not find Elasticsearch suitable for your work.
3. Searchify
Searchify may not be as popular as Elasticsearch. However, if what you seek is an all–rounder search engine service, then Searchify serves its purpose greatly.
Rather than a platform, you can say that Searchify offers a Search-as-a-service scheme. It is because Searchify comes with hosting in its package, helping you manage the servers without a fuss.
Searchify is accessible through Java, PHP, .Net, Ruby, Python, and more. And, even if you do not use any of those libraries, you will still be able to run your own by using the API from the command line. The verdict is, Searchify tries to serve you in the multiple comfortable way possible, so you can use it comfortably.
Feature-wise, Searchify offers great and useful tools to get the best results. Some of them are the auto-complete feature, adding another search field to an existing search, and providing search suggestions.
Moreover, Searchify also has customizable sorting, which enables you to control the search result’s order. And it also has a Snippet feature, which gives you a short part of the document in each result.
If you are curious about how Searchify may help you, there is a 30-day trial that you can get on the website. With that package, you will be able to get 10,000 documents. Additionally, you can also upgrade it to 2,000,000 docs by subscribing to the monthly-paid version.
4. Algolia
“An AI-powered API platform that is fully hosted”. The description might not do Algolia justice, but it still shows how powerful the tool is.
So, how is Elasticsearch vs Algolia?
Using “Search As You Think” as a tagline, Algolia’s main selling point is speed. Algolia claims to be able to serve results within 1-20 milliseconds, making it 200 times faster than its competitors.
Aside from that, the software is also proud of its ability to provide relevant results, the power that is supported by high-tier features, such as tolerance to typos, synonym handling, and advanced language-based configuration.
Moreover, there is also a Personalization feature, which allows the system to give the most relevant result for the user. Additionally, the string of intricate features is also completed with geospatial search, faceting, snippeting, and highlighting.
Despite the high-quality infrastructure that Algolia has, the interface is quite clean and simple. With better than 70 data centers around the globe, Algolia scores quite prominent users such as Lacotes and Medium easily.
Algolia is a free Elasticsearch alternative, allowing you to run 10,000 searches a month. However, you can also pay extra for some additional and definitely useful features.
5. Zinc Search Engine
Golang is designed to be powerful, quick, and easy to implement as a programming language. It is a versatile and lightweight language that can be used for both high and low-level programming.
Due to that reason, Golang is a good choice to be used in search engines. And when it comes to Elasticsearch alternatives in Golang, Zinc Search is the answer.
Not holding back, Zinc Search directly aims for Elastic search’s market. And it does so by offering what Elasticsearch does not have; simplicity.
Indeed, Zinc Search proposes to its market simply an ability to set up and run a search engine without much coding-related fuss. Zinc Search claims to have its system up and running within 2 minutes and a guarantee to mess around with it without ruining anything.
Just because it is simple does not mean it is inefficient. To prove that, Zinc Search provides some basic yet important features such as geospatial search, embedded web UI, and even compatibility with Elasticsearch itself.
Zinc Search is an open-source tool that will not cost you anything. In other words, you can get Zinc Search for free with as little effort as sending a message to Zinc Search’s team.
6. Azure Cognitive Search
If you are looking for Elasticsearch alternatives in Azure, then Azure Cognitive Search is the way to go. Formerly named Azure Search, this tool is incorporated into Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform, and it makes search-as-a-service its focus.
Azure Cognitive Search claims to be the only cloud-search service that possesses the power of AI. So, by using the service, you will have a list of practical features in hand, such as key-phrase extraction, entity recognition, and even an OCR to help you extract information from images.
What about the basic features of search engines? Rest assured, as that is not something for you to worry about. Azure Cognitive Search provides helpful tools such as a semantic search facility, auto-complete, faceting, and geospatial search. Also check Online Security Risks
In terms of the interface, Azure Cognitive Search provides a simple yet intuitive display. That way, you will be able to read the numbers and conclude the analytics with ease.
Lastly, and probably the best part of Azure Cognitive Search; it costs zero. In the free tier, you will have 3 GB of storage and 3 indexes at max.
However, there are six more hourly-paid tiers that you can get, featuring some extra benefits such as scale-out limits. When this article is written, you have to spend less than $8 for its highest tier, which gives 2 TB of storage, 10 indexes per service, and up to 36 scale-out limits.
7. Meilisearch
If you fancy an Elasticsearch alternative in Rust, you will love Meilisearch. However, it is important to know that Rust is not the only supported language in Meilisearch. In fact, it can also be accessed with Dart, Java, Python, Ruby, and many more.
Meilisearch is young, but it does bite. It was launched in 2018 and claimed to have a “lightning-fast” speed and provide “hyper-relevant” features.
How fast is lightning-fast, you might wonder? Well, Meilisearch can serve result in less than 50 milliseconds, making it on par with Elasticsearch, and faster than another few of its competitors.
Meilisearch also promotes easiness to use. It provides smart presets that you can deploy within minutes, and it will help you search your data with minimal or even no configuration at all.
For the basic features, Meilisearch allows you to do filtering, sorting, and faceting. Additionally, your search engine will also be able to tolerate typos, read synonyms and stop words, and even process queries in multiple languages.
Regarding connectivity, Meilisearch has quite a list of integrations, such as Firestore, Angular, and Vue. There is no hassle when it comes to data transferring, as the tool allows you to import data without changing or converting them to a more suitable format.
Saving money is easy if you are using Meilisearch. It provides a free tier with 100,000 documents and 10,000 searches monthly. However, you can also upgrade it to the Pro or Enterprise tier for more capabilities.
8. MongoDB Atlas Search
MongoDB Atlas Search might be the youngest search engine platform in this article. Though young, it already shows a lot of potential, and the features themselves can replace some of Elasticsearch’s main features.
Atlas Search combines three services at once; data-storing, search engine, and synchronization mechanism. Though the other features might be new, MongoDB is not to be doubted with its already-known database feature. So, rest guaranteed, your data is in good hands.
Atlas Search guarantees a relevant and fast search result while providing helpful search engine features. For example, you can do a fuzzy search, look for synonyms, and search index building.
With limited storage and RAM, you can explore Atlas Search for free. However, the package is also upgradeable to up to 1 TB of storage in the monthly-paid package.
The search engine is a popular service, and all of these Elasticsearch alternatives surely has their own strengths and drawbacks. Therefore, to choose which one fits you the most, it is important to know your current and future goals. Hopefully, this list is useful to help you decide.