Compare

Hayfork vs Algolia

Algolia is a hosted search engine you send records to, with deep tooling for product catalogues. Hayfork reads your websites and files for you and returns results by meaning and keyword, with passages and citations for AI agents. This page sets out where each one fits, using Algolia's published prices as of 15 October 2026.

The short answer

Choose Algolia

For e-commerce and catalogue search, where merchandising rules, personalisation, A/B testing, analytics and ready-made UI components matter most, and keyword search covers what people type.

Choose Hayfork

For docs, help centres and product knowledge that people and AI agents need answers from. Point it at a site or upload files, get search by meaning on every plan, and connect agents through the API or MCP.

Side by side

	Algolia	Hayfork
Getting content in	You send JSON records through the API or an integration. A crawler is included with a monthly crawl allowance.	Paste a website address or upload PDF, DOCX, TXT and Markdown files. Pages are cleaned, split along their headings and indexed for you.
Search by meaning	NeuralSearch is part of Elevate, a custom annual plan. Grow and Grow Plus are keyword search.	Matches meaning and exact words on every plan, including Free. Premium search on Team and Business.
What is counted	Search requests and records. Algolia caps record size, so long pages are often split into several records.	Searches and documents. A document is a page or file, counted once however it is split and however many collections include it.
Pricing	Usage-based. Grow includes 10,000 searches and 100,000 records a month, then $0.50 per 1,000 searches and $0.40 per 1,000 records. Grow Plus charges $1.75 per 1,000 searches beyond the included 10,000.	Flat. Free: 5,000 documents and 10,000 searches a month. Team: $49 a month including tax, 50,000 documents and 50,000 searches.
AI agents	Agent Studio, a separate product for building agents on Algolia.	A retrieve endpoint that returns citation-numbered passages sized to a token budget, OpenAI tool definitions, and an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code.
Hosting	Hosted.	Hosted.

What search by meaning costs

Search by meaning lets people find a page in their own words instead of your page titles, and it is what an agent needs to pull the right passage. It is also where the two price lists differ most.

Plan with search by meaning	Price	Included	How you get it
Hayfork Free	$0	5,000 documents, 10,000 searches a month	Sign up
Hayfork Team	$49 a month, tax included	50,000 documents, 50,000 searches a month	Upgrade in the console
Algolia Elevate	Custom, volume-based	Set in an annual contract	Through Algolia's sales team

A documentation site with 2,000 pages fits inside Hayfork's Free plan, search by meaning included, up to 10,000 searches a month. If keyword search is all you need, Algolia's Grow plan is usage-based and can cost less than Team.

Where Algolia is stronger

Product and catalogue search: query rules, merchandising, personalisation and A/B testing.
Search analytics built for teams that tune results every week.
Ready-made UI libraries, so a search box with facets takes an afternoon.
A long track record at very large scale, and a large ecosystem of integrations.

Moving from Algolia

There is nothing to export. Hayfork reads your pages and files directly, so you point it at the source instead of moving records.

Create a workspace and add your site as a website source, or upload your files.
Group the sources into a collection and try your real queries in the search playground.
Replace the search call in your front end. Hits come back in results, with the matched words wrapped in <em> in each snippet:

curl -X POST https://api.hayfork.dev/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_SEARCH_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"collection_id": "COLLECTION_ID", "query": "how do refunds work", "top_k": 10}'

A search key is safe to use from the browser, like Algolia's search-only key. The quickstart covers the whole path in about ten minutes, and the benchmarks show measured result quality on a public dataset.

Algolia prices and plan contents are taken from algolia.com/pricing on 15 October 2026 and may have changed since. Algolia is a trademark of its owner. Hayfork is not affiliated with or endorsed by Algolia.