Algolia vs Vespa
Algolia
algolia.com
Vespa
vespa.aiSide by side
| Figure | Algolia | Vespa |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 7 |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 9.5 (#1) | 8.7 (#5) |
| Spec score · AI Search and Discovery Platforms Software | 9.5 (#1) | 8.7 (#3) |
| Spec score · Site Search Software | 9.5 (#1) | 8.6 (#3) |
| Company legal name | The U.S. contracting entity is Algolia, Inc., a Delaware corporation; Algolia SAS is the French simplified joint-stock entity. | The Norwegian business registry lists the company as VESPA.AI AS. |
| Founded | 2012 | Gartner Peer Insights lists Vespa’s founding year as 2023. |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Vespa says its headquarters and engineering hub are in Trondheim, Norway. |
| Integrations | Prebuilt integrations include Shopify, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2C and commercetools, plus Segment and Google Tag Manager connectors. | Vespa Cloud Enclave can run applications in customer accounts on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. |
| Licence | The core Algolia service is proprietary hosted software rather than an open-source search engine. | The Vespa repository states that its code is licensed under Apache 2.0. |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.3 out of 5 from 156 ratings | 5.0 out of 5 from 12 ratings. |
| Support | Algolia describes support levels ranging from community access to 24/7 enterprise-grade response times; professional services are optional. | The Startup plan includes community support only with no SLA; Cloud plans list unlimited support cases, with response times varying by plan. |
| What it does | Algolia is a hosted search and discovery platform that lets companies index their own data and expose fast search through APIs and user interfaces. | Vespa is a data platform for storing, searching, and processing large structured and unstructured datasets with real-time indexing, filtering, recommendations, and personalization. |
Plans
Algolia
- GrowPriced on request
- Grow PlusPriced on request
- ElevatePriced on request
- FreeFree
- Grow$0.50 a month
- Grow Plus$1.75 a month
- ElevatePrice not published
Vespa
- StartupPrice not published
- BasicPrice not published
- CommercialPrice not published
- EnterprisePrice not published
- StartupFree
- Enterprise *$0.18 a month
- Self ManagedPriced on request
In their own words
Algolia
Algolia is an API-first search solution that combines keyword and semantic methods to return results. Its listed capabilities include NeuralSearch, AI Ranking, personalization, AI Synonyms, analytics, A/B testing, merchandising, a crawler, autocomplete, and query categorization. It is presented for site, ecommerce, and enterprise search across retail, manufacturing, media, financial services, and other use cases. Listed integrations include Adobe, BigCommerce, commercetools, Supabase, Shopify, Salesforce, Segment, and Google Tag Manager. Developers can use InstantSearch libraries for JavaScript, React, Vue, Angular, iOS, and Android, alongside API clients for multiple programming languages. Algolia reports an average search response time under 20 milliseconds and more than 1 billion queries processed every 5 seconds. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 10K search requests/month, 50K records, and allowances for recommendation requests and crawls. It has a 1 GB index size and a 20-index maximum per application. Grow and Grow Plus list 100 GB index size and 50 indices; hosting locations vary by plan.
Vespa
Vespa is an AI search platform for online applications that use data, retrieval, ranking, machine-learning inference, and real-time serving. It supports vector and tensor search, positional text search, and queries over structured data. Ranking signals can be combined with tensor functions or machine-learned models, including ONNX and XGBoost formats; model inference can use ONNX Runtime. Vespa distributes functions across node clusters and allows cluster size changes without affecting queries or writes. Teams can self-manage deployments, use the Vespa Kubernetes Operator, or run on Vespa Cloud. Local deployment guidance lists Linux, macOS, and Windows 10 Pro on x86_64 or arm64 with Docker Desktop or Podman Desktop. Vespa Cloud includes encryption at rest and in transit, certificates for nodes and endpoints, and automatic operating system patching. Its trial provides $300 in credits without requiring a credit card, then stops the application when credits are used. Cloud plans have quotas, and Startup is limited to development zones. Pricing is listed from $0.05 a month, with metered resource rates.