Apache Solr vs Datafari

Apache Solr is a free, open-source, self-hosted search platform built on Apache Lucene. It provides full-text, vector, geospatial, and hybrid search through a REST query interface. Documents can be sent over HTTP as JSON, XML, CSV, or binary, with results returned in those formats. Matching supports phrases, wildcards, joins, and grouping; discovery tools include faceting, autocomplete, spelling suggestions, hit highlighting, and result clustering. Solr distributes indexing, replicates data, balances queries, and supports automated failover and recovery. Apache Tika integration extracts rich content such as PDF and Microsoft Word files. Its administrative interface controls instances and exposes cluster state, logs, threads, and metrics. Listed security capabilities include SSL, authentication, and role-based authorization. Solr runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with API access, and is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0. The project describes use from weekend projects to global enterprises. Releases are not scheduled in advance, and versions below 9.10 are end of life without further updates. The Apache Solr plan is free.

Datafari is an open-source enterprise search solution made by France Labs for finding company data across sources and formats. Its crawlers collect content and metadata, with configurable processing filters and crawl-load management. Listed sources include NetApp, Windows and Samba file shares, Dropbox, Liferay, Alfresco, SharePoint, Documentum, FileNet, CMIS, databases, social networks, and email. A plugin mechanism allows connectors for additional sources.

Search features include multilingual support, spellchecking, suggestions, entity extraction, result clustering, alerts, and autocomplete. Relevance can use document content and metadata, query-specific boosts, entity recognition, and user context such as history, clicks, and department. Datafari supports hybrid and vector search, faceted search, and a REST query interface. Neural Datafari adds vector search and retrieval-augmented answers grounded in documents the user is authorized to access. The free Community plan is aimed at developers and DIY users; its support is DIY. The Initial plan costs $9,900 a year and includes customer support.