When comparing Swiftype vs Sphinx, the Slant community recommends Swiftype for most people. In the question“What are the best search engines for web applications?” Swiftype is ranked 4th while Sphinx is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Swiftype is:
To set up, paste a Javascript snippet, the crawler will create a search engine in minutes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy & fast deployment
To set up, paste a Javascript snippet, the crawler will create a search engine in minutes.
Pro Real-Time Analytics
Built-in search analytics give you live insight into what your users are looking for.
Pro Custom result ranking
Drag-and-drop default results to re-order them. Changes are instantly reflected on website.
Pro Android & iOS support
Swiftype offers full integration with both Android and iOS SDK's
Pro Third Party Compatibility
Swiftype integrates with all major third party platforms, offering a Shopify App, Magento Extension, and WordPress Plugin, with more to come. Swiftype also provides tutorials for adding Swiftype to Tumblr, Jimdo, Heroku, Weebly, Tumblr, CloudFlare, WebStarts and Desk.com. They also have questions dealing with fixes for WooCommerce, how to add Swiftype to any CMS (such as Drupal or Jekyll) and searching across content types (like WordPress using GoDaddy Shopping Cart)
Pro WordPress plugin
Swiftype offers a WordPress plugin for easy integration.
Pro Multiple client libraries
Swiftype has client libraries for Python, Ruby, node.JS, Java, PHP, a search and a separate autocomplete library for jQuery, an iOS SDK, and an Android SDK.
Pro Good search performance
Pro Fast indexing
Since Sphinx talks directly to the database, indexing speed is very fast.
Pro Rich database-like querying features
Pro Batch and real-time full-text indexes
Pro SQL database indexing
Pro Advanced full-text searching syntax
Pro Easy application integration
Pro Non-text attributes support
Pro Non-SQL storage indexing
Pro Good relevance ranking
By default results are ranked by relevance. If you wish, you can adjust the ranking by giving more weight to certain fields.
Pro Excellent scalability
Pro Distributed searching
Pro Flexible text processing
Cons
Con Commercial
Price starts at $300/month.