When comparing Swiftype vs Algolia, 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 Algolia is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Swiftype is:
To set up, paste a Javascript snippet, the crawler will create a search engine in minutes.
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 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 Commercial
Price starts at $300/month.
Con Commercial
There is a Free tier limited to 10k records that can only do 100k operations.