I’ve been using Solr successfully for almost 2 years now, and have never used Sphinx, so I’m obviously biased. However, I’ll try to keep it objective by quoting the docs or other people. I’ll also take patches to my answer 🙂 Similarities: Both Solr and Sphinx satisfy all of your requirements. They’re fast and designed … Read more
This is a great question, something I have pondered over quite a bit. I will summarize my lessons learned: You can easily use Lucene/Solr in lieu of MongoDB for pretty much all situations, but not vice versa. Grant Ingersoll’s post sums it up here. MongoDB etc. seem to serve a purpose where there is no … Read more
As the creator of ElasticSearch, maybe I can give you some reasoning on why I went ahead and created it in the first place :). Using pure Lucene is challenging. There are many things that you need to take care for if you want it to really perform well, and also, its a library, so … Read more
Update Now that the question scope has been corrected, I might add something in this regard as well: There are many comparisons between Apache Solr and ElasticSearch available, so I’ll reference those I found most useful myself, i.e. covering the most important aspects: Bob Yoplait already linked kimchy’s answer to ElasticSearch, Sphinx, Lucene, Solr, Xapian. … Read more