Here’s how marketing and digital experience teams are choosing between SearchStax and SitecoreAI Search for their onsite website search.
Website experience teams move fast in creating content, and their site search needs to match. SearchStax offers a direct connector for Sitecore XP and Sitecore XM that makes all content updates instantly findable, not even Sitecore has such a robust connector.
SearchStax’s Sitecore connector ensures that your search results and index are updated in near real-time when publishing content to XP or XM. That means no complicated processes to make your new content discoverable through your search bar.
Note, that for SitecoreAI both SearchStax and Sitecore will rely on a scheduled crawl to make those search index updates.
Ensuring your most relevant, high converting pages show up at the top of search results shouldn’t take more than a couple of clicks.
The search adjustment experience in SitecoreAI Search is robust. But with that comes some additional complexity. For instance, SitecoreAI Search equips you with the ability to do things like “lift X result 3 positions” so it appears higher than its original organic spot.
This is great for instant impact on a focused scale. But this does not guarantee that the result in question will be at the top of that results page, which is often the point of promoting or boosting a result. Over time, this becomes complex to manage as your content scales.
Creating a UX/UI experience that’s as powerful as your underlying search technology should not be a heavy lift. Both SearchStax Site Search and SitecoreAI Search offer Javascript UI kits to get developers up and running. Beyond that, building with SitecoreAI Search is more of a manual experience.
Setting up an engaging search solution with SearchStax Site Search is easy with Search UI Kits, APIs and native connectors for multiple CMSs, including Sitecore and Drupal.
Development and design teams can easily deliver, iterate and improve search experiences while providing a seamless visual experience and easy deployment.
SitecoreAI Search is often offered as “free” or deeply discounted in bundles with XM Cloud. This is an attractive prospect if you’re considering your total cost of ownership and have search included with your SitecoreAI instance.
The tradeoff in choosing SitecoreAI Search is a heavier implementation lift and onboarding that can often stretch to 6 months or more and require an agency implementation partner. With SearchStax, you’re up and running in a matter of weeks, not months.
Making informed decisions for improving website experiences starts with analytics. SearchStax Site Search includes a dashboard of actionable metrics that shows you exactly how your visitors are interacting with your onsite search.
From Popular Searches, to Click-Through Rate, to No Results Searches and much more, you learn exactly what people are looking for, in their own words. From there, SearchStax Site Search gives you AI recommendations for how to fix issues and optimize your search results right within the dashboard. And it’s as simple as the user accepting or ignoring those AI suggestions with a simple click.
This takes the manual lift of search adjustments off developers’ plates and empowers your web experience team to make meaningful adjustments backed by analytics and AI.
SearchStax has a 4.5 out of 5 rating on G2. Read reviews from some of our happy customers.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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. I am looking forward to seeing this product grow and drive more business our way. The team there are super friendly and very knowledgeable – every question has been addressed and they are so efficient with their responses. We needed a search engine that went the extra mile for our users. Now that everyone is so used to the Google service, they expect the same level from all websites. This product is as good as we will get and we are so happy with it.”
Shawn H.
Web SpecialistEnterprise (> 1000 emp.)
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.”
SearchStax Site Search is best for web teams and marketers who want a seamless and efficient site search implementation for their Sitecore instance, while maintaining controls that don’t bog down their IT teams. Unify data from multiple sources into a single search experience, including outside of Sitecore, with ease. It’s also the right choice for teams on XM and XP who are publishing content at a high velocity and want to ensure that content is indexed and findable right away.
Sitecore Search is best for organizations who have the feature bundled in their Sitecore XM Cloud and have a dedicated technical team with the ongoing bandwidth to take advantage of detailed and time-intensive adjustment controls.
Optimizely
