Algolia vs Bloomreach
How does Algolia compare with Bloomreach? Here’s a brief overview of the two businesses side by side.
Overview
Bloomreach is a digital experience ecommerce platform (DXP); search is now just one small part of what they offer. Bloomreach offers no front-end libraries or API clients (other than a REST API). At Algolia, search is core to our business and we offer a comprehensive and composable end to end AI Search & Discovery platform built with an API-first approach
API-first end to end AI Search & Discovery Platform
State of the art modern architecture based on headless architecture leveraging front-end libraries, API clients - Algolia is part of MACH alliance
17,000+ customers supporting over 1.5 trillion searches a year - rare 99.999% availability SLA with customers WW
Bloomreach
Digital experience platform (DXP) with basic search; they talk about Recommend product but it’s much weaker in comparison with Algolia or other industry solutions
AI (black box approach, limited to no flexibility to fine tune by business) included with different solutions
850+ customers - Bloomreach faces continuous support issues and outages and has nowhere close to Algolia’s performance guarantees
Have a holiday code freeze during the highest traffic volume of the year where the team cannot make any changes. This is tough, especially for B2B customers who aren't as affected by the holidays.
AI
Algolia NeuralSearch is an end-to-end, AI native search solution built for the AI era. Bloomreach offers NLP, but lack vector or hybrid (text + vector) capabilities.
AI-native NeuralSearch with end-to-end AI processing with both keywords and vectors ensuring the most relevant results at scale
Reinforcement learning with dynamic re-ranking to optimize results and ROI
AI-powered query categorization, recommendations, and personalization boosted by industry’s only AI powered automatic query categorization
Bloomreach
The AI approach is black-box and can’t provide reasoning as to why search results are relevant
AI for recommendations and personalization with a pre-built algorithm
AI prediction for modeling customer behavior and opportunities are based on all of its customers' data, which is ecomm only - so relevancy doesn’t work for other ICPs, such as, B2B, marketplaces, customer support etc.
Architecture
Bloomreach is a digital experience platform that is only built for ecommerce. Algolia can be used for multiple use cases beyond eCommerce e.g., customer support, marketplace.
API-first to work in any environment, different-use cases
Built for speed and scale with results optimized for each customer
Allows for multiple indexes which can be searched (federated) at once
Very flexible to customize search algorithm
Bloomreach
All-in-one, full-stack ecommerce offering, from CRM to search
Uses federated data from all customers to adjust relevance
Offers only one index which makes operating the platform slow, unscalable, and not flexible
Doesn’t offer front-end libraries, nor API clients, only a Rest API, making it complex to integrate into various front ends
Very little flexibility in how search is configured; any relevance tweaks need to be done by a service request
Search
Bloomreach started as an SEO company that later evolved to a digital experience ecommerce platform (DXP). Search is now just one small part of what they offer and the core technology is outdated and has severe limitations with scale and performance.
Global leader in search for many different use cases including product and full-site search with industry’s most powerful indexing engine - peak period support of 98,780+ queries per second
Ability to search unstructured, structured, and semi-structured data
Support for voice search, image search
Bloomreach
Site search for product-search
Support for searching structured data on ecommerce sites
No out-of-the-box support for voice or image search at this time
Personalization
Algoli and Bloomreach have both developed personalization capabilities at the core of their platforms. Where they differ is in transparency and ease of use.
Yes, with real-time data for single or cross-session personalization of search results and recommendations
Algolia offers business a no-code solution to fine tune personalization strategies
Bloomreach
Yes with real-time analytics to trigger personalized campaigns via their customer data platform
Personalization tactics aren’t explained, solution is nearly a black-box approach
Analytics
Both Bloomreach and Algolia offer comprehensive analytics. The differences come down to ease-of-use. With Algolia, business teams can work in a no-code environment to set up analytics and manage and monitor campaigns.
Null results, poor results, usage analytics, search behavior, and other metrics
Provides targeted analytics designed to fine-tune search performance
Integrate with your website analytics solution
Bloomreach
Null results, usage analysis, search behavior, and other metrics
Offers broad “all in one” ecommerce metrics
SQL report builder
Overview
Bloomreach is a digital experience ecommerce platform (DXP); search is now just one small part of what they offer. Bloomreach offers no front-end libraries or API clients (other than a REST API). At Algolia, search is core to our business and we offer a comprehensive and composable end to end AI Search & Discovery platform built with an API-first approach
API-first end to end AI Search & Discovery Platform
State of the art modern architecture based on headless architecture leveraging front-end libraries, API clients - Algolia is part of MACH alliance
17,000+ customers supporting over 1.5 trillion searches a year - rare 99.999% availability SLA with customers WW
Bloomreach
Digital experience platform (DXP) with basic search; they talk about Recommend product but it’s much weaker in comparison with Algolia or other industry solutions
AI (black box approach, limited to no flexibility to fine tune by business) included with different solutions
850+ customers - Bloomreach faces continuous support issues and outages and has nowhere close to Algolia’s performance guarantees
Have a holiday code freeze during the highest traffic volume of the year where the team cannot make any changes. This is tough, especially for B2B customers who aren't as affected by the holidays.
AI-native NeuralSearch with end-to-end AI processing with both keywords and vectors ensuring the most relevant results at scale
Reinforcement learning with dynamic re-ranking to optimize results and ROI
AI-powered query categorization, recommendations, and personalization boosted by industry’s only AI powered automatic query categorization
Bloomreach
The AI approach is black-box and can’t provide reasoning as to why search results are relevant
AI for recommendations and personalization with a pre-built algorithm
AI prediction for modeling customer behavior and opportunities are based on all of its customers' data, which is ecomm only - so relevancy doesn’t work for other ICPs, such as, B2B, marketplaces, customer support etc.
API-first to work in any environment, different-use cases
Built for speed and scale with results optimized for each customer
Allows for multiple indexes which can be searched (federated) at once
Very flexible to customize search algorithm
Bloomreach
All-in-one, full-stack ecommerce offering, from CRM to search
Uses federated data from all customers to adjust relevance
Offers only one index which makes operating the platform slow, unscalable, and not flexible
Doesn’t offer front-end libraries, nor API clients, only a Rest API, making it complex to integrate into various front ends
Very little flexibility in how search is configured; any relevance tweaks need to be done by a service request
Global leader in search for many different use cases including product and full-site search with industry’s most powerful indexing engine - peak period support of 98,780+ queries per second
Ability to search unstructured, structured, and semi-structured data
Support for voice search, image search
Bloomreach
Site search for product-search
Support for searching structured data on ecommerce sites
No out-of-the-box support for voice or image search at this time
Yes, with real-time data for single or cross-session personalization of search results and recommendations
Algolia offers business a no-code solution to fine tune personalization strategies
Bloomreach
Yes with real-time analytics to trigger personalized campaigns via their customer data platform
Personalization tactics aren’t explained, solution is nearly a black-box approach
Null results, poor results, usage analytics, search behavior, and other metrics
Provides targeted analytics designed to fine-tune search performance
Integrate with your website analytics solution
Bloomreach
Null results, usage analysis, search behavior, and other metrics
Offers broad “all in one” ecommerce metrics
SQL report builder