Gartner®
Magic Quadrant™ for Search and Product Discovery
Algolia vs Bloomreach
Compare the tactical differences between Algolia and Bloomreach to see which approach is best for meeting your needs.
| Algolia | Bloomreach | |
|---|---|---|
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 | 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 AI Search 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 AI Search with end-to-end AI processing with both keywords and vectors ensuring the most relevant results at scale AI Search 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Null results, usage analysis, search behavior, and other metrics Offers broad “all in one” ecommerce metrics SQL report builder |
Search that understands
More than 17,000 customers in 150+ countries selected Algolia to grow customer satisfaction and sales. Because when your customers feel understood, they click and they come back.
“Algolia is a breeze to work with. With Algolia, our editorial team has seen significant productivity improvements when building the daily online edition of The Times and weekly edition of The Sunday Times, with search being 300-500 times faster than our prior solution.”
Matt Taylor
Editorial Product Manager @ The Times
“Algolia is very fast — able to keep up with our level of traffic… The API and SDK options are really great, and the ability to handle traffic at scale (we have a high volume)”
Matt Goorley
Engineering Manager @ LTK
“[Algolia] was very professional from the start. We had a great Customer Success Manager and team that provided a lot of help and was a great partner.”
Clint Fischerström
Head of Ecommerce @ Swedol
“I think we’ve grown leaps and bounds with Algolia. There's a lot of features that we still can tap into, which is great because I feel like we've gotten a ton out of it already.”
Geoff Lyman
Digital Experience Solutions Manager @ Hershey's
“Instead of having to go into the back end and the catalog—which would have been a technical headache—we were able to figure it out in a matter of a day, test it, and ‘boom’ it’s live.”
Courtney Grisham
Director of E-Commerce @ Shoe CarnivalAn award-winning solution
Inc 5000
Fastest growing companies 6 years in a row
G2 Award
G2 Grid® awards for Enterprise Search Software and Commerce Products