AEM Default Search vs. Solr Search

AEM Default Search vs. Solr Search

AEM Oak Lucene Search :

This is Oak indexing.

Since this is inbuilt search, the indexing happens on AEM itself, which can grow to a large number as per the content repository size. Also index binaries take a lot of space.

Queries can not be cached efficiently here.

In case of e-commerce sites, the contents might be stored on the e-commerce engine. Those will have to be loaded in AEM to use AEM search with them. This will also increase the space requirement.

It doesn't support Natural Language search, keywords indexing, sponsored search, Geo-spatial search and query suggestions/spelling check.

Solr Search :

Reliable, scalabe and fault tolerant

Supports distributed environments which means, there can be cluster of solr instances those can work together to make the most efficient indexing and searching.

Automated failover and recovery

Query caching

You do not have to import the e-commerce contents on AEM for indexing

Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities, Optimized for High Volume Traffic, Highly Scalable and Fault Tolerant, Near Real-Time Indexing, Faceted Search and Filtering, Geospatial Search, Highly Configurable and User Extensible Caching, Query Suggestions, Spelling Rich Document Parsing.


There are two ways of integrating solr with AEM :

i. Rest integration. Search can be performed using rest api.

ii. It can be configured along with AEM Oak index to optimize the jcr query search.

Scenario :

The out-of-the-box AEM searching feature works well and is a good fit for small applications looking to reduce overall costs and simplify implementations. It requires no extra development time/effort to implement it. It can also be configured and optimized to overcome some of its limitations.

On the other hand, integrating AEM with Solr requires design and development, as well as hosting and managing the Solr environments. This would increase costs and overall project timeline, but the reward is a wide variety of advanced searching features, blazing fast search performance, and a reduced footprint in AEM's environments.