When comparing Algolia vs Sphinx, the Slant community recommends Sphinx for most people. In the question“What are the best search engines for web applications?” Sphinx is ranked 5th while Algolia is ranked 6th.
Specs
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 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
There is a Free tier limited to 10k records that can only do 100k operations.