Algolia
Hosted search API with typo-tolerance, faceting, and real-time indexing.
Best for sites that need typo-tolerant, instant search with faceted filtering and good UX.
Use Cases
Free Tier
10K records, 10K search requests/month, 100K operations/month
How to Maximize the Free Tier
Algolia's free tier (10K records, 10K searches/month) is best for documentation search and small product catalogs. Optimize your record size — smaller records mean more of your 10K record budget goes to actual content. The 10K search requests/month limit is the tighter constraint: implement client-side caching of popular searches to reduce API calls. Use Algolia's dashboard to analyze search patterns before upgrading.
Getting Started
Sign up → create index → push JSON records via API or dashboard → install frontend SDK (`algoliasearch`) → add search box → configure faceting, typo-tolerance, and ranking in dashboard.
Pros
- Search quality: Excellent typo-tolerance and relevance ranking — Algolia's search algorithms are best-in-class
- Faceted filtering: Powerful faceting with dynamic filtering, sorting, and instant results as users type
- Developer API: Simple API to index and search — push JSON, search with a query string, get results in milliseconds
Cons
- Record limit: 10,000 records fills quickly for e-commerce catalogs, documentation sites, or content-heavy apps
- Search request cap: 10,000 search requests/month is tight for any site with meaningful user traffic or bot crawling
- Pricing scaling: Pricing scales aggressively with usage — costs can jump dramatically as your index and traffic grow