Fair
AWS offering is a great place to start experimenting the elastic stack before moving it to an on-prem solution. The main costly aspect of using the cloud solution would be storage.
Great product, easy to use
We chose to go with the Elastic Cloud service because the setup was incredibly simple, and we where up and running in minutes. Everything we had done locally was easily transferred up into the cloud service, and in about half an hour we went from a locally running install to a fully functional cloud install.
My only complaint was that I used my email to sign up (I'm an architect) however our support team wanted it transferred into their email when we went live and there is no way to change the primary email after the fact.
That is honestly the only thing I can complain about, other then that it has been remarkably stable, easy to work with, and does exactly what you want it to.
Swiftype
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use of the interface. It was easy to get up to speed quickly.
What do you dislike about the product?
You have to re index sometimes to refresh
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Internal text search and search result tuning.
Bringing the most relevant content to the right audience
What do you like best about the product?
Excellent search solution that helps you to quickly connect your most relevant content to customers. The iOS and Android apps make it even easier to manage content and stay productive on the go. The result ranking tool is extremely useful, and support is second to none.
What do you dislike about the product?
More of the synonym features would be great without having to jump up to such a great cost, but overall it is worth it for a site with a lot of content.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The ability to pull multiple search results from more than one source, allowing for greater, more customisable and relevant search results.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Utilise the Support Team if you have any questions as they are so helpful and knowledgeable.
Easy to customize
What do you like best about the product?
I love being able to log in and customize search results for my users.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes my synonym sets don't save correctly and I have to make them twice.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Before Swiftype, I was relying on Google to power my search, with left me with very little control over updating searches as I rearranged content. Now, I feel like I'm in control of what my users find.
A fast and reliable search software
What do you like best about the product?
Very reliable, flexible and quite fast search software.
What do you dislike about the product?
The main API language of Elastic is JSON-formed. This is very non-intuitive, hard to write manually, very hard to remember the quirks of the syntax in various types of queries.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Searching and filtering in a large corpus of transcripts. Collecting some basic statistics.
SwifType search results are incorrect
What do you like best about the product?
We have installed Swiftype on about two dozen of our web properties and liked the administrative facilities.
What do you dislike about the product?
Unfortunately, and this is VERY SERIOUS, we have noticed that the search results returned by Switftype are incorrect. Some of the results that it SHOULD BE including for a given user keyword request are NOT included and some of the results that it IS including DO NOT match the keyword request.
We have worked with their technical support to no avail.
Unless you test your search results carefully, you wont notice this very serious flaw in the product.
Given that creating the correct set of search results is the basic function of this kind of product, this flaw means that Swiftype is unusable.
We are now in the process of converting to another product.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As mentioned, we have discovered that Swiftype is unusable to solve the basic problem that it is advertised for.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Find another product
Configuration Flexibility was the determining factor.
Elastic Cloud gave us more flexibility and control than the AWS ElasticSearch and the ability to manage it within our AWS market account. Having x-pack available for security and monitoring and ability to customize the configuration for Slack notifications and alerts.
Oh, the things I learned!
The Elastic Cloud service wasn't for us. We use Elasticsearch for storing and analyzing the logs for our various servers/services. We could only store a limited amount of logs (obviously), though much more limited than we would like - your cluster's provisioning are linked on memory and disk space, in order to get more storage you'll also need to bump up the memory. I found I was having to bump to the next tier when my memory usage wasn't even close to maxed out. The price of a production cluster quickly escalated to a point where the cost couldn't be justified. I think this is probably due to our use case - so, your experience my differ.
If you care about uptime, you'll also want(need) to pay for Gold or Platinum support. I liked the convenience of paying through the AWS marketplace - but, the impression I got was that Elastic would prefer you pay them directly.
They also, offer an X-Pack monitoring service, which seems useful, but I didn't use, so I can't comment on it. However, if you chose not to use that service, be prepared to roll your own monitoring solution - otherwise your only way to detect problems pro-actively is via the Elastic Cloud web page.
Perhaps I expected too much from this service, but seeing as it is a pricey option (compared to self hosting), I feel my expectations were justified.
Elasticsearch saves a lot of time optimizing search
What do you like best about the product?
The first thing I like is that it's open source. If it weren't, I wouldn't have used it. Distributed search was another thing which helped me choose elasticsearch. I love the fact that I have control over many aspects of this search engine, providing me opportunity to extend it the way I want and optimize it.
What do you dislike about the product?
Documentation could be improved a lot. Some concepts of elasticsearch take time to learn. Improving documentation and creating hands on tutorial in virtual environment without setup will provide opportunity to get one familiar with the engine and make less mistakes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I used it to implement text search for products. I could do all the things I imagined a search engine should have.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Elasticsearch can be the first choice. For beginners, it is the best.
