When comparing Azure Search vs Algolia, the Slant community recommends Algolia for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted Search Engine as a Service providers?” Algolia is ranked 1st while Azure Search is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Algolia is:
API replies in few milliseconds and they have datacenters all around the world.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to scale
Azure Search can easily be scaled up or down through the admin panel. Users can choose to allocate or de-allocate resources how they see fit.
Pro Guaranteed search performance
Azure Search provides dedicated capacity guarantees which ensure that search performance will be steady for your application.
Pro Free tier available
There's a free tier available with up to 10000 documents and 3 indices.
Pro Very fast and reliable
API replies in few milliseconds and they have datacenters all around the world.
Pro As a hosted service it reduces required maintenance work
Algolia provides worldwide hosting, meaning you can scale up search worldwide at the click of a button.
Pro Optimized UX for autocomplete and find-as-you-type results
Their InstantSearch.js library and accompanying native mobile UX tools make it easy to build beautiful search experiences.
Pro Free Hacker Plan: 10K records and 100K monthly operations
In addition to their 14-day free trial, Algolia supports their Community with a free plan as well as discounts for non-profits, students and the open source community.
Pro Search-as-you-type is built-in
Designed to natively search for prefixes (enables auto-complete menu search OOTB).
Pro Very easy to configure
The configuration is based on tie breaks which makes reasoning about the search easier.
Pro 100% customizable
Pro Language-agnostic & typo tolerance
Algolia's engine has been built in such a way that you can index and search any language, or even several languages at the same time.
The engine is also typo tolerant, and will allow for up to two typos in each words of the search query.
This typo tolerance feature is also language agnostic, as it relies on optimized data structures and "fuzzy" tree traversals (implementing a Damarau-Levenshtein distance algorithm) instead of using dictionaries.
Pro Unique ranking formula combining full-text and business relevance
Their Tie-Breaking Algorithm gives you powerful relevance from day one that you can customize as much as you want by integrating the business metrics that matter most.
Cons
Con Does not integrate with many environments
Azure Search supports only .NET, NodeJS and iOS out of the box at the moment.
Con Commercial
There is a Free tier limited to 10k records that can only do 100k operations.
