Relevanssi Premium vs Ivory Search Pro

In Relevanssi vs Ivory Search, the core job is the same. Both take over the WordPress search, build their own index in your database and find content the default search misses: custom fields, categories, tags, comments and partial words. Both offer synonyms, stop words and fuzzy matching, both highlight the search terms in the results, and both show what visitors search for, Relevanssi Premium through its search logs and Ivory Search Pro through its search analytics.

The difference is where each one puts its weight. Relevanssi Premium works on the quality of one site search: results sorted by relevance, weights for post types, taxonomies and new posts, "Did you mean?" suggestions, the text of PDF and Office attachments, user profiles, taxonomy term pages, a search across a multisite network, related posts, redirects for chosen search terms and WP CLI commands. Ivory Search Pro works on the search forms visitors use: unlimited forms with their own rules, AJAX live search, styling in the customizer, WooCommerce SKU and variation search, filters by author, status and comment count and keyword stemming.

Relevanssi Premium suits content heavy sites, knowledge bases, document archives and agencies with many client sites, where results need to be sorted by relevance and documents searched by their text. Its license covers unlimited sites without activations. Its deal page names the limits: updates and support cover the major version you buy, the search index needs a lot of database space, about three times the size of the posts table, and a live search dropdown needs an extra plugin.

Ivory Search Pro suits shops and company sites that want visible search forms in the menu or header, instant results while visitors type and a WooCommerce product search by SKU. Its tiers start at 1 site, so a single shop needs no large license. Its deal page names the limits too: the look of the forms depends a lot on your theme, the lifetime price equals about five years of the yearly plan, and the vendor refunds only when support cannot fix a problem.

A site search stays in place for as long as the site runs, and with every new post the index grows. That makes a search plugin a typical candidate for a lifetime license instead of a renewal every year. Both vendors sell a lifetime license next to a yearly plan on their own pricing page. Ivory Search includes updates and support for life. For Relevanssi Premium the permanent license covers updates and priority support for the lifetime of the current major version, and its prices are shown without VAT.

The license models point in different directions. Relevanssi Premium has one license for unlimited sites, so the price stays the same no matter how many sites you add. Ivory Search Pro has lifetime tiers for 1, 5 and 25 sites, and the larger Pro Plus plan is sold as a lifetime plan as well. The refund window is 30 days for Relevanssi Premium and 30 days for Ivory Search Pro. The comparison table above lists both lifetime licenses, the yearly plans and the different currencies with their check date.

Both plugins have a free version on wordpress.org, so you can test the base before you pay. The free Relevanssi already sorts by relevance and searches custom fields, the free Ivory Search already builds search forms with live search. Install the free version on a staging site, build the index, then search for a term from a product, a custom field and a PDF and compare what comes back with the default search.

Whichever you test, run only one search plugin at a time. Two plugins that both take over the WordPress search query compete for the same results page. Check the size of your database after the first index run, because a relevance index takes space on your hosting. Switching later means setting up weights, synonyms or search forms again, so write down your settings from the start.