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Should I use Lucene or Solr ?

 

Lucene vs Solr

Many people new to Lucene and Solr will ask the obvious question: Should I use Lucene or Solr?

The answer is simple: if you're asking yourself this question, in 99% of situations, what you want to use is Solr.

A simple way to conceptualize the relationship between Solr and Lucene is that of a car and its engine. You can't drive an engine, but you can drive a car. Similarly, Lucene is a programmatic library which you can't use as-is, whereas Solr is a complete application which you can use out-of-box.

What is Solr?

Apache Solr is a web application built around Lucene with all kinds of goodies.

It adds functionality like

  • XML/HTTP and JSON APIs
  • Hit highlighting
  • Faceted Search and Filtering
  • Geospatial Search
  • Fast Incremental Updates and Index Replication
  • Caching
  • Replication
  • Web administration interface etc

Unlike Lucene, Solr is a web application (WAR) which can be deployed in any servlet container, e.g. Jetty, Tomcat, Resin, etc.

Solr can be installed and used by non-programmers. Lucene cannot.

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