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Coveo vs OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Coveo
Ranking in Indexing and Search
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
AI Research (1st)
OpenText Knowledge Discover...
Ranking in Indexing and Search
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Indexing and Search category, the mindshare of Coveo is 5.8%, down from 8.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) is 6.4%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Coveo5.8%
OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL)6.4%
Other87.8%
Indexing and Search
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2903370 - PeerSpot reviewer
Web Project Manager at a university with 10,001+ employees
Search insights have reduced no-result queries and guide visitors quickly to relevant content
In my opinion, the best features Coveo offers are that it's quick, it's easy to navigate, and if you have something you want to know, Coveo is very helpful in helping you find out how to get the information that you need and sort the information that you need. Of those features, the main thing I find myself appreciating the most in my day-to-day work is being able to find what I need without spending a huge amount of time. The speed and easy navigation are important; there are other tools that do the same thing, but finding what I need quickly really matters.
ERICK RAMIREZ - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Solutions Architect at IMEXPERTS DO BRASIL
Scales linearly and vertically; primarily used in AI
If I am not wrong, IDOL is working to release improvements in new capabilities in the next six months. There is room for improvement in some very important capabilities in visual analytics. They have been focusing on improving the face recognition algorithm. The accuracy of object detection could be improved as well and I know they are working on that at the moment. I would like to see some machine learning capabilities added to the next release.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"AI-enabled query suggestions help users return more frequently and build trust in the search capabilities our site offers, allowing us to drive content towards users based on popular queries."
"I would highly recommend Coveo as it is smart, fast, relevant, and especially suitable for big sites and large e-commerce setups."
"Coveo has positively impacted my organization by cutting down the number of no result searches from something like 15% to about 5%, which is huge, saving calls to call center people and probably preventing people from seeking out products from our competitors, so we get people to pages that they want more quickly and more effectively."
"Coveo already has a very good e-learning platform with multiple courses to learn and certifications to achieve, so it is very good in terms of the learning curve for new users or developers working with it."
"Coveo provides a search engine experience that is superior when compared to the other search engines available in the market as of now."
"Coveo provides AI-driven search results and proper recommendations based on customer interaction and context, which is very beneficial for us because it improves our order conversion rate, allowing customers to find the exact products they want and see similar products, greatly increasing upselling."
"Before moving to Coveo, we had metrics of user clicks around two million, but after we went live with Coveo, user clicks and all view analytics jumped up over 3.5 million, which was a significant upgrade after implementing Coveo."
"In terms of accuracy and reliability of output, I believe Coveo is probably the best in market scenarios."
"IDOL has several important visual analytics, like face recognition and object detection and recognition."
"IDOL is a scalable solution: If a client needs to process more unstructured media content, they can scale IDOL both linearly and vertically, and you can scale this solution very easily."
"Satisfaction and ability to find relevant content has increased over 50% based on our before and after survey results."
"Speed improvements over older Fetch architecture."
"Enterprise search success (finding what documents you're looking for) has gone up over 30% with users finding their hit on the first page of results as opposed to the 2,3,4th or giving up entirely."
"Capability of processing and analysing unstructured data, like audio and video analysis."
 

Cons

"I faced some challenges regarding the accuracy of the search results with Coveo."
"I chose eight out of ten because we have some limitations, such as when we share heavy data, where a large number of data takes more time for Coveo to process; that is one area where Coveo needs to improve, but apart from that, it is good."
"I think Coveo can be improved by providing a sandbox for developers, even if you are not part of an organization, and the API configurations can be made a bit easier because there are a lot of options right now which confuses users."
"I would give Coveo a nine out of ten because the response and everything is fine, but the technical team of Coveo helps us, yet I think it is not one hundred percent."
"While Coveo is overall very fast, I find the development integration somewhat challenging."
"One other suggestion is that as of now, the sync between our Salesforce and Coveo is one hour."
"In a general sense, we are not seeing a remarkable return on investment because maintaining Coveo for our search functionality is costly, and we have to balance investments in search versus other areas."
"Coveo can improve by supporting a few more languages."
"Technical support could improve a lot."
"On-premise implementation and installation is very complicated."
"There is room for improvement in some very important capabilities in visual analytics. They have been focusing on improving the face recognition algorithm. The accuracy of object detection could be improved as well and I know they are working on that at the moment."
"IDOL's tech support needs improvement."
"Understanding how to optimize Lua Scripting configuration to improve performance. Lua Scripts added to a CFS configuration can cause the CFS processing to slow down, if the scripts are not scoped to only run against specific indexing jobs or database content."
"The interface needs to be mobile friendly, which I understand is in the backlog of future improvements."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise15
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Coveo?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that these things are mostly managed by our senior teams. We do not have much idea on what cost we are paying to them. It is not much of my ...
What needs improvement with Coveo?
Coveo can improve based on the rules we have provided in our CMS platform; in my case, we are using a CMS platform integrated with Coveo, so the rules we are providing, called Coveo rules, generate...
What is your primary use case for Coveo?
My main use case for Coveo is that I use it as a search engine for my websites. A quick specific example of how I use Coveo as a search engine for my websites is that we mostly used it for article ...
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Also Known As

No data available
Micro Focus IDOL, HPE Autonomy IDOL, HPE IDOL
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sonus, 3i Group, Adobe, AECOM, American Society of Anesthesiologists, AmerisourceBergen Specialty Group, Centre dÍaccs ö lÍinformation juridique, Genesys, GoPro, Harris, Imprivata, L'Oreal, KeyBank, VMware
RTVE, Krungthai Bank, Kainos, Capax Discovery
Find out what your peers are saying about Coveo vs. OpenText Knowledge Discovery (IDOL) and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.