Hello everyone,
I'm relatively new to managing our company's technical stack, and I've been tasked with evaluating our search-as-a-service solution. We've been using Searchable for a while, primarily for powering the search on our internal knowledge base and employee portal. While it's been decent, I'm curious about alternatives, especially as we scale and our content grows more complex.
Our main needs are reliable and fast employee-facing search, good SDK support for our developers, and predictable pricing as our data volume increases. Features like typo-tolerance and synonyms are crucial for us, given the varied terminology our teams use.
I've heard names like Algolia, Meilisearch, and Typesense mentioned, but I'd love to hear from this community's practical experience. What are you all using in production, and how has it been for aspects like indexing speed, search relevancy tuning, and overall cost of ownership?
Thank you in advance for any insights you can share. I'm hoping to learn from your direct comparisons and real-world use cases.
We looked into Algolia a few months back. It felt solid, especially the SDKs, but the pricing really started to jump once we scaled our record count. We were surprised.
For internal use, we actually went with Typesense on our own cloud VM. It was simpler than we thought to set up, and the control over synonyms and ranking has been huge for our own jargon. Cost is basically the VM bill now.
Have you considered whether you need a full service or if a self-hosted option is viable? Might be worth looking at if your dev team has any capacity.