If you run Adobe Experience Manager and need a real search experience — facets, autocomplete, relevance, and increasingly AI answers — you'll quickly hit the limits of out-of-the-box Oak indexing and start evaluating a dedicated search layer. The usual shortlist is Algolia, Coveo, and Lucidworks — all excellent, all SaaS, all priced per document and per query.

This post lays out the trade-offs honestly, including where the open-source option — Viglet Turing ES — fits and where it doesn't.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) ships with Oak/Lucene indexing that is excellent for authoring and repository operations — but it was never meant to power a public-facing search experience: faceted navigation, autocomplete, relevance tuning, multi-language sites, and increasingly, conversational (RAG) answers over your content.

Most teams reach for a SaaS layer — Algolia, Coveo, or Lucidworks — and pay per document and per query, while their content leaves their infrastructure. This guide shows the open-source alternative: indexing AEM into Viglet Turing ES, an Apache-2.0 enterprise search platform you self-host, with semantic navigation and generative AI built in.