Optimizely
January 16, 2024
Leslie Weller
|
*Updated December 2025
Search is central to how customers and internal teams find content. At SearchStax, we provide two powerful yet distinct solutions that support very different search needs and solve different problems for different users.
This guide frames what each product does, who it serves and how to determine which offering fits your specific search needs. SearchStax Site Search is a search experience solution, while SearchStax Managed Search is a managed service for Solr infrastructure, and we will evaluate them differently. We begin with SearchStax Site Search since that is the entry point for most organizations looking to improve their digital experience.
What is SearchStax Site Search?
SearchStax Site Search is a SaaS site search solution that helps marketing and digital experience teams deliver fast, AI-powered search experiences on websites. Site Search is designed for teams that want a high quality search experience that delivers marketing agility and drives business outcomes.
If you think about the last website you visited that had a polished search box, you probably saw features like autosuggest, hit highlighting and facets that let you refine results or promotions to elevate key content. Site Search provides all of these capabilities out of the box and supports modern best practices for search experience design.
Web visitors increasingly expect AI summaries and natural language understanding, which are available with Site Search. Site Search includes other AI capabilities to reduce searches with ‘no results’ with Smart Match Assist and to improve the order of ranked search results using contextual understanding with Smart Ranking.
What Site Search Includes
SearchStax Site Search offers capabilities that help teams create and optimize modern web visitor experiences:
- A modern, AI-powered site search with Smart Answers, Smart Ranking and more
- Autosuggest, synonyms, related search recommendations and faceted navigation
- Promotions that let marketing teams optimize the search experience with just a few clicks
- Multi-site search management allows for governance and AI-powered experiences at scale
- Actionable analytics provides insight into search performance and content engagement
- Easy for developers to set up with templates, a hosted search experience, UI Kits in Javascript frameworks and well-documented APIs
Site Search is built for organizations that want to drive engagement and conversions through modern search experiences and provide teams with greater marketing agility. As expectations shift toward smarter, AI-assisted search behaviors, Site Search applies these capabilities at the experience layer to improve search results and reduce friction for visitors. Site Search works with traditional CMS/DXP powered websites as well as composable architectures.
What is SearchStax Managed Search?
SearchStax Managed Search delivers fully-managed Solr in any cloud. Managed Search handles the Solr infrastructure administration and removes the burden of provisioning, scaling and maintenance, so your team gains operational agility and search stability through automation, scalability and security.
Why Teams Choose Managed Search for Apache Solr Infrastructure
Apache Solr is a proven search foundation built on top of Apache Lucene, that customers choose for its control, transparency and open architecture. Builders and platform teams choose Solr for its enterprise capabilities and custom app search because it gives them flexibility without lock-in. At scale, self-managed Solr introduces operational overhead, including cluster provisioning, capacity planning, upgrades and failure recovery, which slows teams down. Provisioning clusters, planning capacity, managing upgrades, handling failures and meeting reliability and compliance expectations detract from the operational agility needed to meet expectations.
For engineering and enterprise leaders, the challenge is not whether Solr works, it’s whether they should keep spending scarce engineering time babysitting the search infrastructure instead of delivering business value.
What SearchStax Managed Search Is (and What It Is Not)
Managed Search runs the Solr layer behind applications, while search behavior and UX remain owned by the application or experience layer. Managed Search is designed for builders and platform teams running Solr in custom apps who need reliability at scale without giving up control. Managed Search runs the Solr layer, while the search experience itself lives in the application, including CMS or DXP platforms.
How Managed Search Supports Enterprise Solr at Scale
SearchStax Managed Search operates the Solr infrastructure layer, including cluster lifecycle management and operational maintenance, as usage increases. With Managed Search, engineering teams continue to interact directly with Solr through its APIs and configurations, without needing to build or maintain their own automation, tooling or on-call processes. Application development and infrastructure operation remain separate projects, with Solr reliability handled SearchStax.
How Site Search and Managed Search Differ
Although both offerings involve search, they are purpose-built for different roles and are evaluated on different criteria to solve different challenges.
- Site Search improves the web visitor’s search experience and unlocks new capabilities for marketing teams. With Site Search, marketing and digital teams gain new behavioral insights and deliver optimized, conversion-oriented search journeys on public-facing websites.
- Managed Search provides Solr search infrastructure. Engineering and DevOps teams use Managed Search to power indexing workloads and custom use cases like complex eCommerce search, content platforms and data-driven retrieval.
One point of confusion is that SearchStax Site Search customers do not need to purchase Managed Search separately because Site Search already includes the Solr search infrastructure required to run the experience.
How Site Search and Managed Search Work Together
Some organizations use both products when they have different search needs across their technology stack. For example, a customer might:
- Use Site Search to deliver a modern consumer grade AI search experience on its public website
- Use Managed Search to set up custom intranet search applications or other back end search
In this scenario, SearchStax provides end to end indexing and search experience support. Managed Search ensures the Solr infrastructure behind the CMS is always available while Site Search powers what visitors see on the front end.
Final Thoughts
Site Search and Managed Search are both powerful offerings that serve different search needs. Site Search elevates the web visitor experience while providing marketing agility and Managed Search ensures reliable Solr infrastructure for digital platforms and applications for engineering teams.
If your organization needs help determining the right offering, the SearchStax team can guide you based on your goals, architecture and resources.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Site Search require Managed Search?
Customers who subscribe to Site Search do not need to also sign up for Managed Search.
Who should use Site Search vs Managed Search?
Marketing teams, digital experience teams and website teams will use Site Search to enhance and optimize their website search.
DevOps, Engineering and IT will use Managed Search to offload the burden of managing Solr infrastructure in-house to support a variety of search use cases and custom applications.
