# Apache Lucene Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Site Search Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/site-search-software) **Average Rating:** 3.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 11 ## About Apache Lucene Apache Lucene, our flagship sub-project, provides Java-based indexing and search technology. ## Apache Lucene Reviews ### 1. One of the best tool for commercial and academic application. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 27, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** Easy Implementation and writing/generating Lucene queries are very easy. The implementation is very fast and effective wrappers can be built around it. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** Limitations on some logical operator. For example, operators like exclusive OR might be difficult to write as lucene query in complex situations. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Lucene:** If you are thinking to consider a database for fast retrieval of documents, lucene is great and extendable. **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used Apache Lucene for research in Natural Language Processing tasks like Named Entity Recognition and Commercial application to get documents related to search query. ### 2. Lucene (via SOLR and Elasticsearch) in an Academic Library **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael G. | Developer Analyst, Higher Education, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 28, 2017 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** Full text indexing and faceting controls are Lucene's true strength. You can easily index data based on a schema and immediately search across the whole index with blazing speeds. Sharding allowed for the index to be load balanced and mirrored across multiple back end nodes, providing a fault-tolerant search system. The buy-in from administrators was fairly easy as many of the top federated search engines within the academic library space are powered in some way by Lucene. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** The setup is not trivial for vanilla Lucene. It helps to use something like SOLR or Elasticsearch that sits on top of Lucene to allow for your applications to easily interact with the backend. SOLR provides a great API (with XML and JSON output) for indexing and retrieving data. The statistics capability are the time we used it had a lot of room for improvement. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Lucene:** Considering coupling Lucene with something like SOLR or Elasticsearch in order to simply the indexing and retrieval of documents, as well as speeding up your development lifecycle. **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** The full text search and faceting enabled our library to move into the 20th century in terms of providing a full-featured search tool to our patrons. We used Lucene in conjunction with SOLR to index and expose our metadata from a variety of sources, including MARC, EAD, and HTML data. We eventually incorporated Elasticsearch into the mix to deal with unstructured JSON data (as it can operate without an official schema). ### 3. License for better indexing **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 03, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** It is great for indexing and searching. I have used this library in Global Credit Expansion project where it deals with millions of financial records which require quick search capabilities **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** Pricing for enterprise license is high compared to other solutions **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** Indexing and searching higher number of records ### 4. Search Platform implementation made easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 05, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** Easy integration of our code to Apache Solr **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** It would have been better to have some more manual configurations **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** Added the Search functionality with indexing using Solr ### 5. Lucene/Solr **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anson A. | Data Czar, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** very easy to install and setup. Administration is fairly easy as well. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** not as robust as elasticsearch is. Also cron based. **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** cacheing document searches (json based) without have to hitting the main data store directly. ### 6. Great for improved search speed and relevance **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** Lucene has allowed us to greatly improve our search performance and relevance, by easily indexing all of our data, and with very little configuration for the search we were able to greatly improve how the search product was delivered to our customers. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** The lucene indexes on their own are difficult to maintain and search without experience, to make the most of them they need to be combined with SOLR, this also adds additional functionality which may bloat the application if it is not needed. The tool that the SOLR addition of Lucene provides needs improvement, although it works and does its job and was difficult to set up and get to work in a large scale production environment. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Lucene:** It takes little effort to create a prototype search using lucene with SOLR, in which you will immediately see the benefits out of the box, with a large amount of additional features to further improve it. **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had a slow and expensive database cluster containing multiple servers to cope with traffic and speed requirements, we needed something cheaper, faster and more relevance to our search. Moving to Lucene provided this. ### 7. Great Product to Improve search **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andy T. | Director, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 20, 2016 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** Lucene has vastly improved our in house document search, both with Speed and relevance. After indexing the documents using the built in feeder, there is a great number of ways to manipulate how you break down your data and improve the way you search, using the SOLR interface makes it easy to run queries on data. It was also able to provide a geographical search based on lat/long of the data. Even running lucene without any modifications to the config we were able to immediately see an improvement in speed and relevance **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** The in built feeder was a bit difficult to configure and get working, and even when it was working it was very slow and would often stop working for no apparent reason, after looking into it further we were made aware that this is not meant for production use. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Lucene:** You will instantly see a vast improvement on your search experience using Lucene. **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a large number of documents that require end users to search using keywords and locations, previous attempts using other methods required a lot more preprocessing of the data and was very slow. ### 8. I dont' like Lucene because of its incomplete implementations. **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hamed Z. | Research Assistant, Higher Education, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2016 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** I like Lucene because it's a search engine implemented in Java. Java is a easy-to-understand language. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** I don't like Lucene because of its incomplete implementations, especially for recent state-of-the-art retrieval approaches. When I compare it with the Lemur toolkit, it misses several components. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Lucene:** If you want to implement everything from scratch, Lucene might be a good system! **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am doing research in the field of information retrieval. I am currently solving the problems regarded to the query modelling. ### 9. powerful search engine framework that lets us add search capability to our application **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** It exposes easy-to-use API while hiding all the search-related complex operations. Any application can use this library. Lucene handles all the search related operations. Any application can use lucene framework. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** it is not that flexible. sometime different version has different function for same job **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** indexing document, retrieving document , searching for desired keyword in documents. ### 10. good indexer **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** It scales well horizontally. Throw this in from of Cassandra and call it a day. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** It can be difficult to get up and running and diagnose production issues. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Lucene:** great indexer for big data. **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** indexing a huge database so that we get a faster response time. ### 11. Perfect for Searching Data! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cataldo M. | Assistant Professor (Ricercatore a Tempo Determinato), Research, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about Apache Lucene?** Lucene provides several useful features for implementing search engines and search features in you business appllications. **What do you dislike about Apache Lucene?** Not all the kind of queries are available, but the system is quickly improving and evolving. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Lucene:** The best search engine! **What problems is Apache Lucene solving and how is that benefiting you?** Implementation fo business search engines, semantic search, similarity calculations, entity recognition and recommender systems. - [View Apache Lucene pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/the-apache-software-foundation-apache-lucene/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-26+17%3A15%3A32+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=ffca1e86-981f-4954-b241-44dd6641dc9e&secure%5Btoken%5D=90b63ae96255358093783b7ffb8e1f7cef186c7071d5a4ec3c4541f8973865cc&format=llm_user) ## Apache Lucene Features **Agentic AI - Site Search** - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Search Experience Management - Site Search** - Query Suggestions - Typo Tolerance - Synonyms - Natural Language - Rankings - Personalization **Functionality - Site Search** - Search Analytics - Integrations - Federated Search - Multi-Language Support **Generative AI - Site Search** - Text Generation - Text Summarization ## Top Apache Lucene Alternatives - [Algolia](https://www.g2.com/products/algolia/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (428 reviews) - [Coveo](https://www.g2.com/products/coveo/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (142 reviews) - [Elasticsearch](https://www.g2.com/products/elastic-elasticsearch/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (288 reviews)