Coveo is a popular enterprise search, recommendations, and personalization solutions provider. The company offers a suite of products to help companies manage their information assets across multiple channels. Coveo has over 3,500 customers worldwide and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada.
They provide clients with a comprehensive range of services, including Enterprise Search, Social Media Management, Analytics, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Digital Asset Management, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Mobile Commerce.
However, the search solutions market consists of many outstanding companies that might serve as a great alternative to Coveo, whether you’re looking for a solution that fits your needs or an existing Coveo customer. This guide discusses the ten best Coveo alternatives to provide you with this comprehensive guide, so you get acquainted with the variety of solutions this market offers.
What is Coveo
Coveo is a search-relevance platform that provides search solutions for customers in various industries, such as e‑commerce, complex websites, service-based companies, and workplace applications. This is done through Coveo’s multi-user, cloud-native platform, which brings enterprise content management, analytics, and personalization.
What is Coveo used for?
Since Coveo is a versatile application, different organizations use Coveo to fulfill other purposes. However, the primary use of Coveo is to improve customer satisfaction by integrating search software that aids not only customers but also employees. Therefore, companies use Coveo in e‑commerce, banking, engineering, high-traffic websites, etc.
How does Coveo work?
Most companies have many databases, websites, and storage. This means they all have to be connected in a centralized location for Coveo to search through them. This is where connectors come into play.
Two ways of centralizing content are to pull or push content to a centralized place. To make content, you need a ‘crawler’ that crawls through your sources and extracts data regardless if the data is structured or unstructured.
- Structured data is formatted so that it’s easy for the crawler to extract data and possibly convert it into excel files, CSV, and many other files, making it easy for humans to understand.
- Unstructured data is formatted to make it hard to extract data. Data types include text files, audio, video, and social media embeds.
After Coveo centralizes the content sources such as websites, knowledge bases, catalogs, databases, etc., it turns these data into a single index.
Every search engine needs to have an index. The index can be as simple as the content’s title or as complicated as gathering every word, number, image, metadata, etc. Coveo automatically returns the user’s search using this index, rearranges the results, and filters it in the most appropriate order.
Why do companies need advanced search?
An integrated search box is one of the most critical components in making a website easy to use and navigate for members of any organization. You may have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of goods, but if they are challenging to find, users will not be able to locate what they want and make a purchase. Without advanced search, your customers will hate using your search engine since it’s not giving them the desired results.
Advanced search is not only for customers; it’s also for the employees working in said organization. It would help if you gave your employees an easy time searching through your organization’s knowledge base to increase customer service and employee happiness.
This allows your staff to help individuals discover the information they need from any place, in any format, within their business – databases, document management systems, on paper, etc.
When do you need to implement site search?
A site search should be implemented if your website contains a lot of content, and the users might need some help navigating the website to find relevant information. In addition, organizations such as enterprise businesses or e‑shops need an advanced search solution.
What is the price for implementing Coveo or its competitors?
Coveo has three pricing packages: Base, Pro, and Enterprise.
- Base ($600/month) – The Base package is excellent for starting organizations. With the Base package alone, you get up to 100K queries, two connectors, AI, and an e‑commerce extension. These features are all you need when you’re starting.
- Pro ($1,320/month) – The Pro package is great if your organization needs more extensions. Since it includes the self-service and agent-assist extension, on top of that, you get an additional connector and access to Sandbox. This package is excellent if you transition from the Base package and realize that you need more resources.
- Enterprise (Volume-based pricing) – The Enterprise package is tailored to enterprise-level companies needing an enterprise search solution. This package includes an upgraded query limit of 200k and deep learning for advanced search.
Coveo is priced at the higher end, compensating with many helpful features compared to its competitors.
What are the benefits of implementing an onsite search solution?
The most obvious benefit of implementing an onsite search engine is that you will increase conversion rates on your website because search generates an environment where the customers see relevant information.
However, implementing onsite search will benefit your business on various ends. Here are some of them:
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Increased positive reviews
- Improved search experience
- Save time and cost
- Keeping up with your competitors
- Increased productivity for employees
70%
Visitors who use search are 70% more likely to buy your products.
What are the key search features to look for?
Full-text search
Full-text search refers to a search engine’s capacity to produce results that include all or some of the words in the query. This results in end-users finding precisely what they’re looking for in a database with thousands, if not millions, of entries using a full-text search. This is due to the algorithm’s ability to match each word to the entries. The entry will be displayed as long as a component of the user’s query fits that result.
Front-end integration
Front-end integration allows you to incorporate the search engine on the user-facing side of your website, mobile/web application, etc. This way, you don’t need an IT team to process the software implementation, as it can be done without coding.
Front-end integration can be done through a “middleware” or a custom-made service. A customized solution best suits large-scale businesses, offering significant control and flexibility. However, it makes more sense for small-to-mid scale businesses to find a service that includes self-service front-end integration.
Personalization & synonyms
Personalization & synonyms refer to the user-defined rules and other matching tokens that allow words with similar meanings to appear in comparable, if not identical, results. For example, a user could type “lb” instead of “pounds,” but the search engine should know to provide the same results because these two terms indicate the same thing. This helps reduce searches without results and loss of customers due to a bad search experience.
Other examples of this would include:
- Spelling variants – adding dashes/hyphens, spaces, British English vs. American English, etc.
- Abbreviations – “Dr. Jack” instead of “Doctor Jack,” “TL;DR” instead of “Too long; didn’t read.”
- Local terms – terms that are only used locally to the user’s location
- Professional terms vs. layman terms – terms experienced individuals use compared to easy-to-read language.
Integrations
Integrations refer to the tool/link that helps collect and connect logs, metrics, applications, infrastructure, cloud services, networks, and other workplace tools. In other words, it is a system that helps you connect everything to make processes run more efficiently, which allows you to scale your systems quickly.
Coveo has an excellent integration library with popular platforms such as Sitecore, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Zendesk, which all have native UI connectors with Coveo. And these connectors are based on the pricing plan you’ve chosen.
Best Coveo competitors
Luigi’s Box
Luigi’s Box was named the No. 1 E‑commerce search software in Europe by G2 in the fall of 2021. It has also won additional accolades, including Best Analytics E‑commerce Germany and Search Industry awards. They offer faceted search but also search analytics, product recommendations, or product listing.
Features
Search far beyond full-text
For Luigi’s Box, the primary value in ranking the search results is not the full-text score but the match quality. That means Luigi’s Box also considers business metrics to maximize the purchase probability with optimal product ranking. They rank the results based on clicks, sales, seasonality, the number of products in stock, or even the margin.
Personalized search
Luigi’s Box also includes personalized search, meaning they examine users’ intent and preferences based on their clicks on goods, categories, brands, or filters. The user will get relevant experiences, leading to more interactions with content and greater relevancy of search results.
Front-end integration
Integrating the search tool is as easy as creating an account for Luigi’s Box. You must insert a script into your page’s header or use the tag manager. This makes getting started with Luigi’s Box extremely easy for beginners.
Advanced language support
Luigi’s Box boasts a high-level understanding of CEE languages, helping you reach your business goals with larger audiences. This is a fantastic feature because not all search engines, like Luigi’s Box, will support CEE languages with attention to detail.
Pricing
Another fantastic feature of Luigi’s Box is the ability to create a custom plan regardless of your website’s demands. You can get an estimated price by utilizing the plan calculator. The calculator considers your website’s average monthly views, services you want, and many more.
Customer service
Over 2000 e‑commerce businesses rely on and use Luigi’s Box, and one of the reasons for this is because Luigi’s Box provides exceptional customer service and a free trial of their services. If you are interested in Luigi’s Box, you can quickly contact them through email, phone, or customer help form.
Pros
- Extremely easy to setup/integrate (perfect for non-developers)
- Excellent customer support
- Excellent CEE language support
- Customizable pricing plans
Cons
- Trial only for Analytics
- AI synonyms could be better
SearchBlox
SearchBlox is a company that builds intuitive and intelligent insight engines on open-source technologies. SearchBlox has many different features and core values that are helpful for online businesses.
Features
Connectors
Although the way teams communicate has changed, most insight engine pricing has not. They don’t charge an additional fee for connections. The price includes references for over 150 data sources and over 40 document kinds, allowing you to link the search to your team’s favorite tools.
Embedded Search
SearchBlox’s search offerings include additional integrations by default. Embedded search provides a better search experience where your users work to make finding what they’re looking for easier.
Built-In Encryption
You can protect your data and reputation with built-in security at the user, index, and document levels. You may be sure that your information is safe during the search.
Developer Features
SearchBlox has comprehensive developer features, including REST-API, Data Ingestion, SearchAI Features, Custom Header – X-Correlation-ID, Content API, and excellent documentation.
Pricing
SearchBlox offers transparent pricing plans. You can choose from different packages and try them in a 30-day trial.
Customer service
SearchBlox’s customer service is highly responsive and for all their tools.
Pros
- Customer service
- Excellent documentation (for developers)
- No extra cost for additional connectors
- Transparent on pricing plans
Cons
- Built from open-source projects (might be a red flag for some)
Clerk.io
Clerk.io automates personalization and relevance through the customer journey to drive sales across search, product suggestions, email, social media, and ads.
Features
Quick Results
Clerk.io possesses sound AI capabilities, instantly learning from customers’ preferences and tendencies. With the combination of Clerk.io’s entire tech stack, you are bound to get instant results.
Easy to Start
Every company is unique in terms of industry, size, etc. Therefore it also requires individual plans. Clerk.io have a customized onboarding experience based on what you need and how you operate. This is great for any business looking to get started but doesn’t exactly know how to.
Run Multiple Sites
With Clerk.io, you can run multiple sites free of charge! It benefits anyone running numerous large-scale websites because it is straightforward to implement and start with!
Design Personalization
Clerk.io results can easily be customized to fit the theme of your website, which positively increases the digital experience and increases search conversion.
Pricing
Clerk.io offers a plan based on your business size, starting from €79.00/mo.
Customer service
Clerk.io is available to help with anything from onboarding to quick tips and strategic guidance regarding your website or through 1-on-1 conversations, webinars, email, live chat, manuals, or our extensive help center.
Pros
- Pricing based on usage
- Run multiple sites without extra charge
- Extensive customer service
Cons
- Price for the services
- The interface might not feel very user-friendly
AddSearch
AddSearch is another AI-powered search service. It allows you to request a demo or even try their service for free. Through their AddSearch crawler or API, they provide comprehensive implementation help and a quick setup for any platform.
Features
Ranking Management
The most important part of a website is its content. The more relevant, accurate, and valuable the information you provide to users, the better they can find what they are looking for on your site.
With AddSearch, you get to control the ranking of the search result pages for specific keywords. You can use the analytics tool to determine which keywords people are searching for and rank the pages accordingly.
Comprehensive Monthly Reports
AddSearch provides its customers comprehensive monthly reports, allowing for greater insight into all the different metrics of your website search.
Analytics
Search Analytics is a free tool that helps track and analyze the performance of your search engine. It provides comprehensive insights into how visitors use your site and help you manage content accordingly.
Pricing
Depending on your company’s demands, AddSearch has a variety of programs to choose from. The Essentials package includes 1,000 documents and 50,000 searches for $29 per month. The Professional plan is $99 per month and includes up to 100,000 monthly search queries and 10,000 papers. Finally, the Premium package, which costs $499 per month and includes 25,000 documents and 500,000 monthly search queries, is the most expensive.
If these plans don’t meet your needs, you may schedule a call to request an Enterprise-level plan, including customs documents and search query numbers. At this level, though, expect a high price tag.
Customer service
The Customer service at AddSearch is excellent. If you fill out their support form, they guarantee that they will contact you within one business day, and you can also message them via the AddSearch chatbot on their website. They also offer seminars and blogs with helpful site search strategies and insights if that’s not enough.
Pros
- Speedy customer service
- Offers seminars and blogs to help you with search strategies
- Built-in website creator/designer
- Multiple advertising platforms
Cons
- Pricing is on the high-end
- A crawler may be a bit exhausting
Unbxd
Unbxd is a product discovery platform powered by artificial intelligence, founded in 2011, and has powered 1300+ websites worldwide. And it all started from a nightmare experience for shoppers struggling to search for products on websites.
Features
Recommendations
With Unbxd’s AI-powered recommendation algorithms, you can understand and respond to shoppers’ purchase tendencies in real-time. Personalized suggestion widgets can help your customers discover more things and raise their overall basket size by upselling and cross-selling products.
Merchandising
Use a straightforward user interface and a robust visual workbench to manage product promotions. This allows you to learn why and where your items rank, use ranking insights, and A/B test alternative techniques to find the best mix.
With Unbxd’s AI-based automation, you can better engage shoppers with a tailored browsing experience for each customer group.
Product Information Management
With Unbxd, you can create a single, centralized source of truth based on multiple product data sources. This means you can enhance the overall quality of your product information by transforming and enriching the data, leading your customers to get the product information faster and compellingly, leading them to purchase.
Secure, reliable, and fast
Unbxd is SOC II compliant, has a <65ms response time, and is highly reliable, keeping a 99.999% uptime on its servers for the last few months. This means you won’t ever have to worry about your search tool going down.
Pricing
Unbxd has four pricing plans: ($99, $399, $999, $1999, and custom amounts) per month, which is already quite expensive for the starter plan ($99). However, this is balanced out because Unbxd has unique features that any website would miss.
Customer service
Unbxd can easily be contacted through their customer query form. You can also schedule a demo or talk to a PIM expert.
Pros
- Excellent features
- Excellent security, reliability, and speed
- 10+ years experience in the industry
Cons
- High-end pricing
- No publicly available review on customer service experiences
SearchNode
SearchNode is a site search solution designed for medium-to-large e‑commerce businesses wishing to improve their search engine. They have a completely automated AI search engine that eliminates all manual procedures, allowing you to spend more time on other things.
It’s a fast-growing Lithuanian IT firm. They offer a complete search engine that combines a robust search engine with solution developers, intelligent algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
Features
Relevant Matching
Even if a search term is available in many categories, provide just relevant search results. SearchNode executes advanced data processing by designing unique solutions, ensuring that client data is clean, consistent, and ready for relevant search.
Custom Stemming with Support For Different Languages
SearchNode achieves the maximum potential conversions and understands words written in any case and form. SearchNode’s talented developers continually develop and improve custom NLP algorithms.
Automated Search Assistant
SearchNode helps you prevent users from abandoning the site by offering proactive help during the search process. SearchNode keeps track of each user’s search history and makes intelligent product recommendations to increase conversions.
Advanced Analytics
SearchNode allows you to make data-driven, educated decisions while giving sophisticated analytics reports, consolidating and optimizing similar searches, and making data reading and analysis a breeze that will enable you to recognize hot trends early and act quickly. Optimize marketing strategies, set fair prices, and get ready for the excitement surrounding trendy items.
Pricing
SearchNode does not provide any set plans, and its website does not list any costs. You can request a demo or obtain a free site search audit and analysis to determine your existing site search success.
Customer service
SearchNode may be contacted by email, which can be found on their contact page. You can also phone their local business lines in Lithuania and the United States.
Pros
- Excellent advanced features
Cons
- No set plans – unclear cost
Yext
Yext is a cloud-based site search service that lets you use various brand management tools to assist your clients in discovering what they’re looking for. Thousands of well-known firms throughout the world rely on them. Samsung, Subway, Lego, Verizon, and Campbell’s are a few firms involved. They’ve also been a G2 award winner for the previous few years.
Features
AI search
AI search is based on a knowledge graph, centralizing your company’s most critical data so you can provide direct answers across all platforms where consumers or workers seek information, such as your brand website, customer care channels, and intranet. Multiple algorithms are used to power the AI search. When scanning your Knowledge Graph and drawing from unstructured information to answer inquiries with the most relevant snippets, AI search uses three algorithms (compared to one for a traditional keyword search)
Natural Language Processing (NLP) Support
Yext uses natural language processing (NLP) to decipher the meaning and context of search questions in the context in which they are asked. This is extremely useful for websites with lots of content and needs concrete and detailed query analysis.
Listing Management
Listing management is vital, especially for e‑commerce websites. A great listing manager creates a pleasant experience for the customer, leading them to stay on the site and come back for more. Yext has a very competent listing management tool that allows you to do just that.
Pricing
Yext pricing plans are invoiced yearly. Their Emerging Starter Package is $199 a year and costs $4 per week. The Essential Plus Package is $449 a year and costs $9 every week. The Complete Standard Package is $499 per year and costs $10 per week. Finally, they offer a Premium Advanced Package for $19 each week with a yearly fee of $999. However, these fees are subject to vary, especially if you choose to use any of Yext’s other services.
Customer service
Yext’s customer service can be contacted using their website’s contact sales page. You may also reach them via their social media profiles or by calling their local New York phone. They also provide a variety of publications, blogs, customer tales, webinars, events, and tips to assist you in resolving minor concerns.
Pros
- Tailored to e‑commerce websites
- Great for websites utilizing social media in their content strategy
Cons
- No monthly plans (only yearly plans)
Algolia
Algolia is a search API designed for developers that want to provide fast and accurate search results on mobile and desktop. Algolia utilizes AI to help your consumers quickly locate the items or information they’re looking for.
Features
Natural Language
Algolia’s multilingual engine supports alphabetic and symbol-based languages (Chinese, Japanese or Korean). This is no simple task, given all the little and significant distinctions across languages, such as using symbols from various alphabets, Japanese, or several versions of the same stem, as in German. As a result, your website can deal with the nuances of such languages.
Typo Tolerance
Typos happen all the time. This means a good search tool needs to tolerate typos accurately. Algolia does just that, leading the customers to relevant results regardless of their search.
Admin Dashboard
Dashboards are essential to gathering the necessary information at a moment’s notice. With Algolia, you get an excellent admin dashboard that shows you metrics such as search performance, usage reports, queries, and many more.
Integrations
Algolia also hosts an array of integrations such as .NET, Adobe, Adobe Commerce, Android, Angular, Bubble, etc.
Pricing
Their Basic Algolia Search Plan costs $1 per 1000 monthly queries. Algolia Search Premium, an improved version, costs $1.50 per 1000 monthly queries. Finally, the Algolia Recommend Plan is available for $0.60 per 1000 recommended monthly requests. You may also choose from various add-ons, each with its price.
Customer service
Algolia’s customer care can be contacted by filling out their customer request form. They also provide free access to blogs, libraries, events, and a quick start guide.
Pros
- Trusted and long-term search solution provider
Cons
- Pricing plans are based on traffic, making it hard to forecast pricing costs
- Not fully customizable
Swiftype
Swiftype helps thousands of businesses deliver millions of highly relevant queries daily to searchers. Swiftype is highly trusted by influential organizations such as CBS, Shopify, Aol, at&t, Samsung, okta, and BMW.
Features
Integration and Rollout
Swiftype makes adding search to your website a breeze. When you enter your website’s address, Swiftype will index it and develop a search engine for you in real-time. If you are a developer, you might find Swiftype’s API beneficial to get further control.
Autocomplete
Swiftype has an excellent autocomplete tool that provides real-time results as visitors type and directs visitors to the essential material, answers, or goods.
Advanced Search Algorithm
Swiftype is based on a complex search algorithm that returns relevant results for the most complex queries. Therefore, people can search naturally and not have to worry about getting the wrong results, thanks to Swiftype’s language modeling intelligence.
Content Ingestion
Swiftype collects material instantaneously, keeping your search results fresh with automated synchronization while offering an API platform’s versatility and the ease of an intelligent web crawler. Swiftype transforms unstructured input into highly structured data using bespoke schemas, meta-tagging, and extraction, assuring maximum relevance and rich result display.
Pricing
Swiftype provides three monthly pricing packages ($79, $199, and custom pricing). The Standard ($79) is perfect for anyone wanting to implement a search algorithm on their websites. However, with the Pro ($199) package, you are guaranteed rapid growth using PDF/document indexing tools and cross-domain search. Depending on your needs, you can also ask for a custom price with the Premium Package.
Customer service
Swiftype has one of the largest forums and clear documentation for anyone needing help. However, there doesn’t seem to be direct 1-on-1 communication with customer support. Everything is forum-based which means other people can see it as well.
Pros
- Highly trusted by influential companies
- 10+ years in experience
Cons
- There doesn’t seem to be 1-on-1 customer service, or if there is, it’s unclear where to find it.
Lucidworks
Lucid charts are focused on gathering information from Search easier and have been doing so for 15+ years and now averaging 300K+ users daily.
Features
No Search Experience Required
Your website users deserve relevant search results. Lucidworks’ Connected Search is focused on helping you with just that. Connected Search uses machine learning, which allows you to fine-tune results with a single button press.
Quick Indexing Results
With Lucidworks, you access blazing-fast indexing using Connected Search, ingests any public site or authorized document repository, crawling, indexing, and searching thousands of documents in minutes. Users are presented with your unique mix of site material and file kinds, ensuring that results are constantly current, complete, and, most importantly, relevant.
Excellent Search Relevancy
Lucidworks’ deep learning models can recognize customer intent and tendencies and deliver the most appropriate information to each unique user. Without guessing, coding, or money, guided processes allow anybody on your team to change and increase relevance.
Pricing
Lucidworks provides no set prices. Instead, it’s divided into three parts (Commerce, Customer Service, and The Workplace). If you want to try out Lucidworks, you must request a quote.
Customer service
Lucidworks has comprehensive help & support documentation for common problems you may face. Request a customer support ticket if you don’t find your question answered.
Pros
- No search experience is required making it an excellent option for beginners.
Cons
- No set prices (have to contact and request a quote)
Conclusion
Having a solid site search solution will undoubtedly aid your company’s success. Nobody wants to spend hours hunting for a single service that might not even work. And users need to quickly and easily discover the things they’re looking for while also being able to look at other related results if the site has a good search function.
Some search softwares are better for big businesses, while others are better for small businesses. Some just give a single service, while others provide tools to aid your company’s growth. We hope this article gave you a helpful understanding of the market option and helped you on your journey to pick the best intelligent search solution for your business.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
How do site search solutions work?
Site search (also known as on-site or internal search) tools allow users to receive results from a website by typing queries into a search box. There are several techniques to site search, but they all aim to provide website information depending on a user’s search bar input. However, the general process is usually -> (indexing, processing, and returning results to the user).
In what pricing range is Coveo?
Coveo is priced higher, starting from $600 per month compared to other services.
What are alternatives to Coveo?
Suitable alternatives to Coveo depend on your needs. There are many services worth checking, like Luigi’s Box, Swiftype, Algolia, or Clerk.io.
What is the best alternative to Coveo?
There are plenty of alternatives. If you are interested in comparing Luigi’s Box and Coveo, check the G2 Luigi’s Box vs. Coveo comparison table.
Barbora does magic with words in Luigi's Box as a product marketing specialist. She got into writing while studying at university as a volunteer for various civic associations. Besides being part of Luigi's Box marketing team, she co-organizes the TEDxBratislava conference, where she cares about marketing and PR.
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