Best Magento search engines in the cloud
With the incorporation of Elastisearch as the default search service in Magento 2.4.x and the elimination of the SQL engine, surely many users will see their needs covered for their customer product searches. But we have had cases of clients with very extensive catalogs, of more than 50,000 products, who continue to see Elasticseach somewhat ineffective and seek to take another step to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Nowadays a competent search system has to deliver results in fractions of a second. We know that e-commerce store users abandon sites where the loading of a page exceeds 2 seconds.
We have tried several for weeks, and we opted for these 2.
When using an external search service, Elasticsearch which we know consumes a lot of resources, remains in the background, freezing resources to the rest of the server services.
1. Sooqr search
This is for us the best search service that exists for Magento.
The functions that we highlight are the following, some are available only for the superior subscription plans.
Pros
- Instant search, cached by remote script
- Full customization of results sorting options. Default sorting field, Ascending, Descending.
- Complete customization of search fields. Fields involved, attribute mapping, weight, connection with Google Analytics services.
- Statistics
- Free module for Magento available
- Less server stress.
- Full reindex of product feed takes less of 10 minutes, tested with large catalogs. Reindex can be done as separate Cron Job.
- Tested with a product feed with > 7000 attributes.
- Very efficient ticket/email support. They even offered us a free customization of the results template.
Cons
- The service is not particularly cheap, for a store with 50.000 products, our customer pays around 300€ per month.
- The company is Netherlands based and offers limited support for other EU languages like Spanish.
2. Doofinder
This is a very interesting second option, especially for customer looking for a more competitive price.
The functions that we highlight are the following, some are available only for the superior subscription plans.
Pros
- It is so far cheaper than Sooqr, for a store with 50,000 products, the price would be around 50€ per month.
- Instant search, cached by remote script
- Multi-index search
- Less server stress
- The product feed is generated automatically in the background by the free module available.
- Synonyms, promotional banners, redirections.
- Very efficient support, by chat, email, providing quick resolutions & answers.
- They offer native support agents in English & Spanish languages.
- Free module for Magento available
Cons
- The service has a limitation. If you use more than 1000 product attributes in your store, it just doesn't work.