The State of Site Search in Higher Education Research Report with The Chronicle of Higher Education | Download the Report
The State of Site Search in Higher Education Research Report with The Chronicle of Higher Education | Download the Report
SearchStax is a Coveo alternative that empowers marketing

SearchStax is a Coveo alternative that empowers marketing

With SearchStax Site Search, your marketing team is empowered from implementation onward. Imagine a powerful search experience that doesn’t require IT development to make ongoing adjustments. Optimizing your search stays in the hands of the web experience decision makers.

This provides you with an onsite search that meets your internal team’s needs to move fast and make adjustments while delivering exactly what your website visitors are searching for.

Coveo is a heavier implementation with ongoing management processes. Implementation is typically layered and complex with Coveo, reliant on technical agencies, which results in lengthy wait times to make updates for even minor optimizations and changes.

Coveo for commerce and workplace, SearchStax for content-rich websites

Coveo for commerce and workplace, SearchStax for content-rich websites

SearchStax Site Search equips marketers with levers to control and influence website visitor outcomes via search optimizations.

SearchStax drives deeper visitor engagement and conversions on content-rich websites, such as those in higher education, healthcare and government via effective and engaging search results. SearchStax gives marketers new insights into visitor behaviors with practical AI tools that improve marketing workflow and visitor experience.

Coveo is a sound option for large intranet, knowledgebase, support and ecommerce sites as they are considered a leader for those use cases.

Balancing AI-powered search features and human controls

Balancing AI-powered search features and human controls

SearchStax prioritizes core search principles like relevancy, accuracy and control while implementing a practical use of AI.

SearchStax Site Search allows you to easily adjust rankings, boost results and promote key pages to personalize your visitors’ experience. AI-powered features like Smart Ranking use large language models to understand the deeper meaning of visitors’ searches and better connect them with the content they’re looking for.

With SearchStax’s Smart Match Assist, your content expert can accept or reject AI suggestions, ensuring accuracy and trust; this is particularly important in risk-averse industries like higher education, healthcare and government where the right results are critical.

Coveo is heavily focused on generative AI, with its top uses surrounding digital workplaces and intranets. While Coveo does include generative AI features, they can be challenging to use in regulated industries where trust is critical and humans still need to have the final say on what shows up in your search pages.

Value to total cost of ownership

Value to total cost of ownership

When it comes to cost, SearchStax delivers value. We provide robust tools designed to maximize your return on investment. We help your team understand, plan, set up and tune your search experiences based on your goals and your visitors’ expectations.

With SearchStax, you own your site search. The power to make adjustments is always in your team’s hands.

Coveo leans heavily on agency partners to implement search. This can be an attractive option for those who are engaging in a website redesign project and want their site search solution to be scoped into that initiative.

For those organizations who have in-house developers and want to upgrade their search, SearchStax makes it easy. Coveo’s reliance on agency partners inflates the total cost of ownership and leaves less control in your team’s hands from implementation to ongoing search adjustments.

Developer-friendly UI components

Developer-friendly UI components

Creating a front end experience that’s as powerful as your underlying search technology should not be a heavy lift.

SearchStax Site Search empowers your team to set up an engaging search solution with Search UI Kits, APIs and native connectors for popular CMSs, including Sitecore and Drupal.

Development and design teams can easily deliver, iterate and improve search experiences while providing a seamless visual experience and straight-forward deployment.

When considering a Coveo alternative, see what our customers have to say

SearchStax has a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. Read reviews from some of our happy customers.

Taela W. 

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

“We have been searching for a quality product like this for a while – especially one that integrates well with Sitecore – and this product has fulfilled all our requirements and some. This product is as good as we will get and we are so happy with it.”

Gopikrishna Reddy G. 

Small-Business

What do you like best about SearchStax?

SearchStax is instrumental and quick to build search pages with the provided UX accelerators.

  1.  It always integrates very well with Sitecore. Simple package installation, rapid to populate the schema and rebuild the index.
  2. Our Marketing team loves the option to update stopwords, synonyms, spell check and auto-suggest words themselves without any help from the technical team.
  3. Very easy to consume the provided developer APIs.
  4. Developer and User documentation have been excellent and easy to follow and understand.
  5. Team is quick to help with any queries and issues.
It helped build the Search page very quickly without many customizations. We could reduce lots of development effort and save time during the implementation.  As it is a SaaS product, we are off from the maintenance burden. Marketers can make all their changes without much help from the technical team. Rich analytics are helping to understand better what our customers are searching for.

Sabina F. 

Software Engineer
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

“The SearchStax Site Search product has amazing functionality that has been easy to integrate with Sitecore. We gained valuable insight into how our customers use the search features on the website and what they are searching for (through the excellent analytics provided by the dashboard), which made the search experience easier to personalise. We wanted to use the product to manage searching on a multilingual website, a feature that wasn’t available when we started the implementation. However, when we mentioned the business need for this, the team assured us they were working on it, and, sure enough, they released the multi-language feature and helped us integrate it. The team was always very receptive to feedback and, as a result, even released a new feature in a matter of weeks when we presented a client use case for it.”

Randall W.

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

“The SearchStax team actively listens to our feedback and has implemented features that have significantly enhanced the value of their tools. They continuously introduce new capabilities, such as machine learning and AI, which have greatly improved our users’ ability to quickly and easily find content. Our customer representative regularly reviews our analytics and provides valuable recommendations for optimizing our search functionality.”

Shawn H.

Web Specialist
Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

“I like best the ease of use and the robust feature set that SearchStax offers. The platform is intuitive, making it easy to manage and optimize our search functionality without requiring extensive technical knowledge. Additionally, their customer support is responsive and helpful, which has made our experience even better.”

Verified User in Marketing and Advertising
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

I really like the Searches Dashboard. I like how it is set up by popular searches, no result searches and searches with no clicks. I like to see the search count and percentages. I like control of the stopwords. I like how we were able to incorporate a better filter system for our directory. I like the great customer support we have been given with directory features. I use it daily.

Key Takeaways​

Key Takeaways

  • SearchStax Site Search is best for web teams and marketers who want a seamless and efficient site search solution. It’s also right for those who want the power of AI features and recommendations with the transparency of human management and controls.
  • Coveo is best for organizations prioritizing commerce and internal knowledgebase, support and intranet search needs. Those who have dedicated IT teams and implementation partners with experience in artificial intelligence, who are available to make search adjustments and can keep up with on-going maintenance.

Ready to upgrade your onsite search?

SearchStax vs Coveo: Onsite Search Comparison FAQ

What is the difference between SearchStax and Coveo for onsite search?
  • SearchStax: Focuses on delivering a modern search experience that provides marketing agility and practical AI capabilities. Digital marketing teams can easily customize and refine their search results for a powerful search experience visitors can easily engage with. SearchStax excels in providing content-rich sites with relevance tuning, reporting and control.
  • Coveo: A feature-rich AI-powered search platform designed to enhance search relevance through machine learning. It emphasizes AI-driven personalization and advanced search analytics but may require more complex integration and maintenance.
Which platform is easier to implement and maintain?
  • SearchStax: Known for its straightforward integration process with powerful APIs and developer-friendly tools. Its infrastructure simplifies maintenance, providing a more hands-off experience for teams focused on delivering great search experiences without ongoing operational headaches. SearchStax leverages practical AI with simple controls for marketers and non-technical web teams.
  • Coveo: While robust, Coveo’s advanced AI capabilities can require more setup and fine-tuning, making the initial implementation process more complex. Ongoing maintenance may demand more IT resources and expertise.
How do SearchStax and Coveo compare in terms of customization?
  • SearchStax: Provides high levels of customization, allowing web experience owners to precisely control relevance tuning, ranking algorithms and the overall search experience. Practical AI features equip teams with the ability to easily accept or decline suggestions for synonyms and more, creating a blend of AI-enhanced decision making and human control. SearchStax well-documented APIs provide ultimate flexibility to create engaging search experiences and stand out from your competition.
  • Coveo: Offers customization but is primarily focused on commerce conversions and call deflection, and therefore may require complex customizations to service the needs of content-rich website search requirements. Users looking for advanced relevance customization may face limitations unless deeply integrated with Coveo’s platform with IT-supported expertise.
Which platform offers better analytics and reporting?
  • SearchStax: Provides detailed analytics and reporting out-of-the-box, allowing teams to gain insights into search behavior and optimize the experience continuously. SearchStax provides AI recommendations for marketers to accept or deny with a simple check box, which keeps a human and domain expert in the loop when curating highly relevant search experiences.
  • Coveo: Delivers analytics through its platform, but it often requires extensive setup effort to extract useful insights, especially for non-technical users.
How do pricing models compare between SearchStax and Coveo?
  • SearchStax and Coveo both price based on search volume and index size and offer enhanced capabilities in their higher tiered pricing packages.
  • Unlike some other search vendors on the market, both SearchStax and Coveo do not count every keystroke as a query. For example, auto-suggestions as you type are not counted as queries for neither SearchStax nor Coveo.
  • SearchStax: Offers three plans from an Essential tier for companies just starting out on their search modernization journey to our most popular Advanced plan, all the way up to our Premium plan which handles the more sophisticated full AI-powered use cases.
  • Coveo: Coveo will typically have a higher starting price as they offer two full-featured plans Pro and Enterprise with no real entry-level offering.
What type of customer support is available for each platform?
  • SearchStax: Provides dedicated support with a strong focus on customer success. Users benefit from expert guidance throughout the implementation process and ongoing optimization guidance.
  • Coveo: While offering support for users, with Coveo there is a steep learning curve that requires significant technical training. Depending on how you apply Coveo’s AI capabilities it can require even more specialized expertise, which may not always be readily accessible.
Which platform is better for enterprise-grade onsite search?
  • SearchStax: Ideal for enterprises seeking powerful, customizable search solutions with transparent analytics, marketing agility and a fully-managed infrastructure.
  • Coveo: Suitable for organizations who have technical team members available to deal with complexity of implementation and management.
What’s the bottom line when comparing SearchStax and Coveo?

If you’re looking for a solution that improves marketing agility, provides practical AI tools that drive real business value and gives you the highest return on your total cost of ownership, SearchStax is the superior choice. For organizations prioritizing ecommerce and internal use cases and willing to invest in the necessary setup and maintenance, Coveo may be worth consideration.