When comparing Algolia vs Ambar, 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 Ambar is ranked 9th. 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 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.
Pro Simple Interaction
User-friendly web interface with realtime statistics, intuitive administrative tools and REST API. Integrate with any system without reading endless manuals.
Pro Instant Search
Language-analyzed full-text search including fuzzy queries, phrases and metadata search. Done in milliseconds, no matter how many documents indexed or how complexed query is.
Pro Reliable Engine
Multi-source document collection and deduplication. Smart document content retrieval and indexing for any file type. Horizontally scalable to petabytes of data and billions of documents.
Cons
Con Commercial
There is a Free tier limited to 10k records that can only do 100k operations.
