When comparing Elastic Cloud vs Algolia, 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 Elastic Cloud is ranked 2nd. 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 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 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 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
There is a Free tier limited to 10k records that can only do 100k operations.