When comparing Elastic Cloud vs Swiftype, the Slant community recommends Elastic Cloud for most people. In the question“What are the best hosted Search Engine as a Service providers?” Elastic Cloud is ranked 2nd while Swiftype is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Elastic Cloud is:
Rather than pricing by number of documents or API calls, they price by instance size. So if you have a lot of documents (>100k) that are very small (50MB), or a large number of shards which are small, you won't be arbitrarily forced into a higher pricing tier. Same deal with number of requests - if you need more memory on your instance, then upgrade. If you have a lot of very fast requests, you can stay on a lower tier.
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Pros
Pro Scalable
Rather than pricing by number of documents or API calls, they price by instance size. So if you have a lot of documents (>100k) that are very small (50MB), or a large number of shards which are small, you won't be arbitrarily forced into a higher pricing tier. Same deal with number of requests - if you need more memory on your instance, then upgrade. If you have a lot of very fast requests, you can stay on a lower tier.
Pro All Elasticsearch features are supported
Pro New versions are available same day as released
Pro Extremely stable
This is the official version of hosted ElasticSearch and it's backed by the ElasticSearch developers. This makes it probably the best in terms of stability as far as services that use ElasticSearch as a backend go.
Pro Comes with Shield (security), Watcher (alerting) and Marvel (monitoring)
Pro Allow uploading custom plugins
Pro Includes S3 bucket for snapshot and restore (Automatic Backup every 30 minutes)
Pro Free trial available
There's a 14 days-long trial available without any credit card required.
Pro Dedicated clusters with reserved memory and storage
Clusters aren't shared, customers get their own dedicated cluster. Memory and storage is reserved - there's no upper limit in terms of indexes or documents to be stored - and Linux containers are used (LXC) for and process and resource isolation, which means you get the memory you are paying for without having to compete for it with other customers.
Pro Great support
Supported by the Elasticsearch developers themselves, although they won't respond for days.
Pro Easy to work with
Elasticsearch gained its popularity amongst developers by being enjoyable to use. A simple feature comparison against it's competition doesn't convey the significant advantages of just how easy it is to work with. This is due to multiple design choices such as the use of JSON for the API and queries.
Pro Allows multiple types of documents per index
Another useful and unique feature to Elasticsearch is the ability to have multiple types of documents in a single index. You can then facet, query or filter against all document types or a single type.
Pro Supports cjk plugins
Pro Includes x-pack
Xpack is plug-in for elastic search and Kibana. It provides features for securing and monitoring your elastic search instance.
https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack
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.
Cons
Con Support not satisfactory
Although this is provided by the creators of elastic search, the support is not as effective. It seems they only want you to buy the Gold / Platinum package for support.
Even though you clearly give proof to the support personnel that there is something wrong with the provisioning of the cluster do not be surprised if you get a mail back saying "Everything looks fine...blah blah ...consider taking gold/platinum support...blah blah."
Con Constant sales pitch for their platinum support, even during outage
Con Expensive
Typically 0.5-3x the cost of other providers.
Con Commercial
Price starts at $300/month.