Fess vs SWIRL AI Search
Fess
fess.codelibs.org
SWIRL AI Search
swirlaiconnect.comSide by side
| Figure | Fess | SWIRL AI Search |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $2,000/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 5 |
| Spec score · AI Enterprise Search Software | 8.3 (#6) | 7.8 (#13) |
| Deployment | Fess runs on operating systems with a Java or Docker runtime environment. | SWIRL can run inside a customer's environment on-prem, in a private VPC, or in a cloud tenant, using Docker Compose or Kubernetes. |
| Product | Fess is an open-source enterprise search server for searching websites, files, and databases. | SWIRL provides federated AI search across enterprise systems, querying live as each signed-in user with permissions enforced at the source. |
| Support | The open-source edition is community-supported and has no guaranteed support; paid professional support is available by email. | Departmental includes community and email support, Business includes a standard SLA and priority support, and Enterprise includes a premium SLA and named technical account manager. |
Plans
SWIRL AI Search
- Paid pilot$12,000, paid once
- Departmental$24,000 a year
- OEM & Source Code License$60,000 a year
- Business$72,000 a year
- EnterprisePrice not published
In their own words
SWIRL AI Search
SWIRL AI Search provides federated search across enterprise systems, querying source systems as each signed-in user and applying permissions there. The maker says searches do not copy, index, or move source content; retrieved text is held for the request. Its three-pass ranking uses keyword/BM25, E5-Large-V2 embedding re-ranking with hybrid fusion, and an MS-MARCO cross-encoder. SWIRL can generate cited answers from retrieved sources and flag claims unsupported by them. It lists more than 150 connectors, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, ServiceNow, GitHub, Confluence, Jira, Box, and databases, and supports more than 100 LLMs, including on-prem models through Ollama and compatible frameworks. Enterprise exposes a REST API and MCP server for agents to access ranked, permissioned answers. Customers can deploy on-prem, in a private VPC, or in a cloud tenant using Docker Compose or Kubernetes. Enterprise supports SSO through OAuth2/OpenID Connect and can use Microsoft Presidio to detect and redact personal information. The optional Semantic Cache is separately licensed and is an exception to the no-vector-store approach. Departmental licensing is $24,000/year; a free plan and free trial are listed.