A CLEAR COMPARISON
Lucidworks vs. HawkSearch
Don’t Let E-commerce Functionality Constrain Your AI Future.
HawkSearch is a pure-play e-commerce search platform that drives revenue with smart search options like concept search and visual search, and offers merchandising tools for quick conversions. However, an enterprise requires deep control and extensibility to integrate custom ranking models and proprietary ML models. Lucidworks empowers both developers and business users with fine-grained control and extensibility, supporting custom models and plugin pipelines.
Get a Demo
Feature‑by‑Feature: Lucidworks vs. HawkSearch
| Capability | Lucidworks | HawkSearch |
|---|---|---|
| AI / LLM & Semantic Understanding | Lucidworks AI/Neural Hybrid Search enables deep semantic matching across structured and unstructured data, with support for custom embeddings, vector and keyword search, and retrieval-augmented generation patterns. | HawkSearch supports “Smart Search” including concept search, visual search, and GenAI-style responses via LLM agents. |
| GenAI / Conversational / Smart Response | Supports conversational search, summarization, and GenAI via retrieval-augmented pipelines with enterprise governance and prompt customization. | Smart Response summarizes and answers queries, but with more limited model control and customization. |
| Data Acquisition & Connectors | Data Acquisition supports real-time ingestion, transformation, normalization, and numerous out-of-the-box connectors (CMS, PIM, CRM, LLMs). | Connectors and APIs (REST, SDKs) with common platform integrations, but less breadth of enterprise data tooling. |
| Merchandising & Business Rule Control | Commerce Merchandising Studio: drag-and-drop rules, boost/bury, pinning, preview, multivariate testing—driven by AI signals. | Boost/bury, dynamic targeting, and marketer-friendly tools. |
| Handling Complex, Multi-Domain / Multi-Modal Data | Scalable Solr-based core with AI pipelines; handles structured, semi-structured text, images, embeddings, and multimodal fusion. | Concept search, visual/image search, and multimodal inputs supported. |
| Developer Flexibility & Extensibility | Open APIs, custom ranking models, custom embeddings, plugin pipelines, and bring-your-own models (TensorFlow, PyTorch). | REST APIs, SDKs (React, Vue), and configurable pipelines; deeper model customization is more constrained. |
| Operational Scale, Resilience & Deployment Choice | SaaS, self-hosted, or hybrid; clustering, high availability, disaster recovery, and cross–data center scaling. | Primarily cloud/SaaS; no on-prem or hybrid architectures. |
| Business Insights & Analytics / Merchandising Intelligence | Signals Beacon for deep signal analysis, anomaly detection, merchandising insights, and recommendations. | Reporting, conversion/traffic metrics, product dashboards; less advanced AI insights for optimization. |
| Ease of Use / Business User Tools | No-code/low-code studios, rule editors, preview tools—non-developers can manage relevance and promotions. | Workbench and merchandising UIs; complex setups often need technical support. |
| Transparent Enterprise Pricing & Licensing | Designed for large, multi-app deployments with transparent licensing and enterprise support. | Search/AI usage licensing; pricing varies by channels, tiers, and customization scope. |
While HawkSearch offers solid AI features and strong support for merchants, Lucidworks delivers a full enterprise AI platform with deeper extensibility, deployment flexibility, and advanced insights. Lucidworks enables both business and developer teams to control relevance, train custom models, and scale across multiple use cases, extending beyond e-commerce. You get not just a search engine, but a strategic AI layer that powers discovery, personalization, internal applications, and analytics. Choose the platform built for enterprise continuity, extensibility, and long-term AI strategy.
Customer Win: From a limited toolset to a platform built for extensibility.
A major B2B manufacturer was using HawkSearch to power its extensive product catalog. The platform delivered good, revenue-boosting results through its machine learning and core merchandising tools.
However, the manufacturer had a sophisticated in-house data science team that wanted to leverage proprietary machine learning models for pricing optimization and supply chain signals into the core search relevance. They quickly realized a significant problem: while HawkSearch offers flexible APIs and rule customization, its design as an off-the-shelf, AI-powered search tool means it provides less control over complex workflows and is less adaptable for highly customized use cases. The deeper model customization and ability to “bring your own ML models” were constrained.
Instead, they chose Lucidworks as a strategic partner. Lucidworks supports custom ranking models, plugin pipelines, embedding libraries, and open APIs, allowing the enterprise to bring its own ML models into the platform. This capability empowered their data science team to fully integrate their custom logic for pricing and inventory into the search experience, something the pure-play e-commerce solution could not support. They built a truly composable future with a platform that met their immediate e-commerce needs while providing the open, flexible architecture for long-term data science innovation.
