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Paradigm B2B Combine for Search and Discovery Solutions: Enterprise Edition
Informed by leading B2B Search & Discovery practitioners and designed to zero in on the individual strengths and weaknesses of vendors, the Paradigm B2B Combine (Enterprise Edition) is targeted directly at the key interests of the Search & Discovery technology buyer.
Read on to see why Algolia medaled in 12 of the 12 categories of the 2025 Enterprise Combine evaluation.
Algolia medaled in 12 of the 12 categories of the 2025 Enterprise Combine evaluation (6 gold medals, 5 silver medals, 1 bronze medal).
Algolia processes nearly 2 trillion search queries per year, second only to Google, and differentiates itself based on the speed of the results sets it returns and the transparency it offers customers regarding the performance of its algorithms. Pricing tiers are based on the number of keystrokes initiated as a part of a broader query framework. Algolia is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco, CA (USA). Customers spoke highly of Algolia’s analytics and reporting capability, visibility into the performance of the system, and the ease with which the solution can be set up. Some customers expressed concern about the potential for Algolia’s pricing model becoming unaffordable to customers with especially large data sets, the company’s choice to make AI a premium-priced offering, and relatively weak recommendations.
Algolia is a feature-rich search & discovery platform that is particularly well-suited for enterprise B2B companies looking for a solution with a highly-scalable infrastructure optimized to deliver industry-leading fast search results.
Paradigm B2B LLC uses a robust scoring methodology to evaluate all vendors on a scale of 1 to 5 across 48 detailed and weighted criteria. Medals are awarded based on composite scores in 12 distinct categories. Special weighting is given to the “voice of the customer” via market feedback that Paradigm B2B LLC gathered directly from dozens of vendor partners and clients. The opinions expressed in this report are those of Paradigm B2B LLC and should not be considered statements of fact.
| Category | Type | Medal |
|---|---|---|
| Ability to Execute | Strategic pillar | Gold |
| Customer Service & Support | Strategic pillar | Gold |
| Partner Ecosystem | Strategic pillar | Gold |
| Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) | Strategic pillar | Silver |
| Vision & Strategy | Strategic pillar | Gold |
| Category Browse & Faceted Search | Product capability | Silver |
| Guided Selling | Product capability | Gold |
| Keyword/Term Site Search | Product capability | Gold |
| Merchandising & Results Management | Product capability | Silver |
| Personalization | Product capability | Silver |
| Recommendations | Product capability | Bronze |
| User Friendliness | Product capability | Silver |
Gold medal: Exceptional “Ability to Execute”
Understaffed and underfunded eCommerce platform vendors struggle to deliver on promises—and clients know it. Everyone has had a bad experience with a vendor over-promising and underdelivering. Savvy practitioners are now doing deep due diligence on the quality of the management team and the resources of the company to determine whether vendors can actually make good on their claims.
Gold medal: Exceptional “Customer Service & Support”
Problems always arise in the implementation and operation of an eCommerce platform. Most of the time the issues are minor, but sometimes they’re major. Vendors today must maintain detailed processes and policies in order to ensure that they are highly-available and eminently qualified to fix problems.
Gold medal: Exceptional “Partner Ecosystem”
B2B companies know that they’re no longer buying a one-size-fits-all platform that’s owned and operated by one company. Every platform is augmented by independent developers and implementation partners. The breadth and depth of the ecosystem is now a critical factor in the decision-making dynamic.
Silver medal: Superior “Total Cost of Ownership”
Whether a B2B company has millions or just tens of thousands of dollars to spend on installing and implementing a solution, the price of the platform matters. Beyond the initial price, a platform can quickly go from affordable to unaffordable over a 3-5 year time period when the full costs of implementation, operation, and maintenance are incorporated.
Gold medal: Exceptional “Vision & Strategy”
Choosing an eCommerce platform is a major investment of time and money. B2B companies know that their digital success is tied to their vendor’s success. It’s important that vendors be crystal clear about their near-term roadmap and long-term vision and how they plan to recruit partners and acquire customers.
Silver medal: Superior “Category Browse & Faceted Search”
B2B buyers must see standardized features and descriptions to be able to compare similar products and services. This section describes the functionality that B2B search and discovery solutions use to support a dynamic, filtered presentation of product and service categories, dimensions, and attributes.
Gold medal: Exceptional “Guided Selling”
With an ever-growing catalog of products and services to choose from, B2B buyers need help deciding. This section describes the functionality that enables B2B sellers to use standard technologies like search, and emerging interfaces like chatbots and voice assistants, to help B2B buyers refine a search, receive directed help, and resolve long-form natural language questions.
Gold medal: Exceptional “Keyword/Term Site Search”
It is a truism in the world of B2B that buyers cannot buy on a site what they cannot find on a site. This section describes how Search & Discovery solutions recognize the term being searched for within a document, file, or image and ensure that the results are relevant to that search.
Silver medal: Superior “Merchandising & Results Management”
B2B buyer attention is short and what customers see first matters. This section describes the functionality that enables B2B sellers to display search results in such a way that those items that are most relevant to B2B buyers are displayed most prominently.
Silver medal: Superior “Personalization”
All B2B buyers today expect tailored buying experiences. Increasingly, they also expect B2B sellers to have deep knowledge of their historical, and expected future, buyer behavior. This section describes the functionality that enables sellers to rapidly customize an experience to B2B buyers based on past purchase history and negotiated, custom prices for specific products.
Bronze medal: Differentiated “Recommendations”
Sometimes B2B buyers know what they want when they visit a website, and sometimes they don’t. This section describes how B2B sellers can offer B2B buyers high-quality suggestions based on key attributes predicated on user-specific and generalized input criteria.
Silver medal: Superior “User Friendliness”
As we all know, it’s hard to make something easy. Creating an uncluttered B2B buying experience requires that B2B sellers be well informed about customer journeys and preferences. This section describes how B2B sellers design and experiment on the site, offer training, and use analysis and reporting to iterate quickly.
Informed by leading B2B Search & Discovery practitioners and designed to zero in on the individual strengths and weaknesses of vendors, the Paradigm B2B Combine (Enterprise Edition) is targeted directly at the key interests of the Search & Discovery technology buyer. In my years covering the B2B industry, B2B practitioners rarely asked me to force-rank software solutions. Rather, not only did they ask me about the capabilities of the product (e.g., personalization, recommendations), but they frequently asked me how well companies have historically delivered on their promises (e.g., vision, pricing).
For example, I was often asked by B2B practitioners how responsive a particular vendor’s team was if there was an outage, or how many and what kind of partners they had in their services ecosystem, or how open they were to feedback and product roadmap suggestions. These questions mattered to the buyers I worked with as much as, or more than, how many features a product had or what it cost relative to a competitor’s offering.
I created the Paradigm B2B Combine to give the people who buy Search & Discovery solutions my unvarnished assessment of how well vendors are performing in critical categories. I’m mirroring the combine process that professional sports teams use to evaluate the capabilities and fit of draft candidates across key performance areas. My goal is to make it possible for those managing Search & Discovery solutions to easily determine where and how a solution best meets their customer needs and aligns with their culture, technology stack and partner ecosystem.
Sincerely,
Andy Hoar
Andy Hoar established the criteria for the Search & Discovery Combine based on years of experience in the space and recent interviews with senior B2B practitioners, systems integrators, and Search & Discovery platform vendors. The decision-making dynamic for Search & Discovery platform technologies today is too complex to capture in a single, two-dimensional graphic. It’s also the case that there is no single solution that addresses all of the needs of Search & Discovery platform technology buyers.
The Paradigm B2B Combine scores each solution in mutually exclusive categories and awards Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal distinctions to finishers within certain scoring ranges. The purpose of the Paradigm B2B Combine is not to force-rank solutions, but rather to score the capabilities of certain offerings against objective criteria and enable buyers to see where individual solutions are relatively strong vs. weak. The goal is to put the Search & Discovery platform vendors through the paces so that buyers can make well-informed decisions without having to spend months of time executing their own research.
Search & Discovery solutions make it possible for B2B manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and resellers to most effectively merchandise and sell their goods and services to B2B customers who are actively seeking to buy. These tools enable B2B buyers to find the most relevant product or service, in the most convenient format available, within the fastest time possible. These solutions include (but are not limited to) functionality modules and capabilities such as: keyword search, synonym identification, content and image search, boost & bury capability, results optimization, taxonomy management, attribute sorting, personalization, recommendations, analytics and reporting, and guided selling.
Paradigm B2B selects all vendors to evaluate and only allows invited companies to participate. The evaluation is a pure “no pay for play” process—no vendors can pay for admission to or placement within the Combine. All evaluated vendors are given the same opportunity to present their company vision, product capabilities and roadmap, go-to-market strategies and tactics, partner ecosystem, and customer case studies.
Paradigm B2B uses a robust scoring methodology to evaluate all vendors on a scale of 1 to 5 across 48 detailed and weighted criteria. Medals are awarded based on composite scores in 12 distinct categories. Special weighting is given to the “voice of the customer” via market feedback that Paradigm B2B gathered directly from dozens of vendor partners and clients. The opinions expressed in this report are those of Paradigm B2B and should not be considered statements of fact.
Like all vendors, Search & Discovery platform vendors struggle to deliver on promises—and clients know it. Everyone has had a bad experience with a vendor over-promising and underdelivering. Savvy practitioners are now doing deep due diligence on the quality of the management team and the resources of the company to determine whether vendors can actually make good on their claims.
Problems always arise in the implementation and operation of a Search & Discovery platform. Most of the time the issues are minor, but sometimes they’re major. Vendors today must maintain detailed processes and policies in order to ensure that they are highly-available and eminently-qualified to fix problems.
B2B companies know that no platform stands alone within a technology stack and no solution has a monopoly on using the company’s data. Every platform is augmented by independent developers and implementation partners. The breadth and depth of the ecosystem is now a critical factor in the decision-making dynamic.
Whether a B2B company has millions or just tens of thousands of dollars to spend on installing and implementing a solution, the price of the platform matters. Beyond the initial price, a platform can quickly go from affordable to unaffordable over a 3-5 year time period when the full costs of implementation, operation, and maintenance are incorporated.
Choosing a Search & Discovery platform is a major investment of time and money. B2B companies know that their digital success is tied to their vendor’s success. It’s important that vendors be crystal clear about their near-term roadmap and long-term vision and how they plan to recruit partners and acquire customers.
B2B buyers must see standardized features and descriptions to be able to compare similar products and services. This section describes the functionality that B2B search and discovery solutions use to support a dynamic, filtered presentation of product and service categories, dimensions, and attributes.
With an ever-growing catalog of products and services to choose from, B2B buyers need help deciding. This section describes the functionality that enables B2B sellers to use standard technologies like search, and emerging interfaces like chatbots and voice assistants, to help B2B buyers refine a search, receive directed help, and resolve long-form natural language questions.
It is a truism in the world of B2B that buyers cannot buy on a site what they cannot find on a site. This section describes how Search & Discovery solutions recognize the term being searched for within a document, file, or image and ensure that the results are relevant to that search.
B2B buyer attention is short and what customers see first matters. This section describes the functionality that enables B2B sellers to display search results in such a way that those items that are most relevant to B2B buyers are displayed most prominently.
All B2B buyers today expect tailored buying experiences. Increasingly, they also expect B2B sellers to have deep knowledge of their historical, and expected future, buyer behavior. This section describes the functionality that enables sellers to rapidly customize an experience to B2B buyers based on past purchase history and negotiated, custom prices for specific products.
Sometimes B2B buyers know what they want when they visit a website, and sometimes they don’t. This section describes how B2B sellers can offer B2B buyers high-quality suggestions based on key attributes predicated on user-specific and generalized input criteria.
As we all know, it’s hard to make something easy. Creating an uncluttered B2B buying experience requires that B2B sellers be well informed about customer journeys and buyer preferences via intelligent interface design, A/B testing, user dashboards, and real-time data gathering. This section describes how B2B sellers design and experiment on the site, offer training, and use analysis and reporting to iterate quickly.
Andy Hoar is one of the world’s leading authorities on B2B eCommerce and digital business and strategy. He’s written about, and consulted extensively with, distributors and manufacturers at global Fortune 100 companies and leading B2B companies that are digitizing their direct and indirect selling initiatives. Prior to founding Paradigm B2B and Master B2B, his joint venture with Brian Beck, Andy was a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, where he authored the seminal work on B2B eCommerce. Andy has been quoted in various media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and CNBC. He is a summa cum laude graduate in economics from the University of Dayton and holds advanced degrees from Harvard University and Northwestern University.
Digital innovation produces an ever-changing, unpredictable, and challenging environment that can make or break a B2B company. To be successful, B2B companies must transform archaic business practices and business models and fundamentally rethink how they interact with customers. Paradigm B2B’s purpose is to help guide B2B companies through today’s complex, digital-first environment. B2B companies need world-class strategies and roadmaps, as well as clearly differentiated customer experiences, in order to thrive in an increasingly disrupted commerce landscape. Paradigm B2B focuses on offering high-quality advice that’s well-informed and immediately actionable.
The information contained in this report has been collected from sources believed to be reliable and credible. Paradigm B2B LLC does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information about the products referenced and bears no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information obtained. Paradigm B2B LLC does not endorse any vendor, product or service evaluated and does not advise buyers to choose only those vendors that earn medalist distinction. The opinions expressed in this report are those of Paradigm B2B LLC and should not be considered statements of fact. Paradigm B2B LLC disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, about this research, including any endorsement of the use of an evaluated solution for a particular purpose.
Paradigm B2B Combine for Search and Discovery Solutions (Enterprise Edition, February 2025). Copyright 2025 Paradigm B2B LLC. Unauthorized copying or distribution is a violation of copyright law.
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