XTAL vs Searchspring: Which Search Platform Is Right for Your Store?

If you're a Searchspring customer and you've been getting emails about something called "Athos Commerce," you're not alone in feeling unsure what it means for your store. A rebrand on top of a merger on top of a timeline shift is a lot to process while you're also trying to hit Q1 numbers. Before you decide anything — whether to stay, negotiate your renewal, or explore alternatives — it helps to understand exactly what happened and what your realistic options are.

This article is a head-to-head comparison of XTAL Search and Searchspring (now operating as Athos Commerce). We'll start with the merger context because it matters to the decision, then get into an honest feature and pricing comparison, and end with a practical framework for who should stay and who should consider switching.

---

What Actually Happened: Searchspring Becomes Athos Commerce

In January 2025, PSG-backed Searchspring acquired Klevu — an AI-powered search platform with a strong footprint in Europe and mid-market Shopify — and merged the two companies under a new brand: Athos Commerce. They also folded in Intelligent Reach, a feed management and marketplace syndication product, to round out the platform.

The vision is straightforward: combine Searchspring's search and merchandising capabilities with Klevu's AI and NLP technology into a single, unified ecommerce optimization platform. The name is a nod to Mount Athos — strength through combination.

For existing Searchspring customers, here is the official timeline as of early 2026:

• Now: Your Searchspring product continues to work exactly as before. Bug fixes, support, and maintenance are ongoing. Pricing is unchanged for equivalent features.
• Q1 2026: General Availability of the new Athos Commerce platform. Searchspring customers get a documented upgrade path with guided migration support.
• 2027 onwards: Legacy platforms (Searchspring and Klevu) begin gradual retirement, with full transition support promised.

That is the official story. The practical reality is more nuanced.

What Customers Are Actually Experiencing

The original roadmap called for a beta in April 2025 and full public launch in Q3 2025. That schedule was revised in August 2025, with the Q3 launch pushed to protect existing customers through peak season (BFCM) and move the general availability date to early 2026. The company framed this as a customer-first decision, and there is logic to it — migrating a search platform weeks before Black Friday would be reckless. But the slip also means customers who expected a 2025 transition are now looking at a longer status-quo period than they planned for.

The longer-standing complaints about Searchspring — documented consistently on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius — are worth noting here because they predate the merger and are unlikely to have been resolved by a rebranding:

• Pricing opacity and annual commitment locks. Searchspring has historically required annual contracts, and reviews frequently cite difficulty exiting or renegotiating terms. Pricing is quote-based (not self-serve), and upgrade paths can add cost quickly as sessions or SKUs grow.
• Support quality inconsistency. Multiple G2 reviews over the past two years describe experiencing high CSM turnover — new account managers, disappearing contacts, support gaps after previous acquisition cycles. Post-merger staffing changes can amplify this pattern.
• Implementation overhead. Searchspring rewards teams who invest in it: merchandising rules, boosting configurations, synonym dictionaries. For teams without a dedicated search owner, that overhead becomes a recurring tax.

None of this makes Searchspring a bad product. For teams who have built workflows around it and have the personnel to maintain those configurations, it can deliver strong results. The question is whether the current moment — a merger, a platform migration on the horizon, and a contract renewal coming up — is a good forcing function to evaluate your options.

---

Feature Comparison

A few things worth expanding on:

AI and semantic search. Searchspring's original search engine is a keyword-based system with traditional relevance tuning. The AI capabilities in Athos Commerce come primarily from the Klevu side of the merger, and it remains to be seen how tightly integrated those capabilities are in the new unified platform. XTAL runs two LLM stages on every query — query enhancement with brand context and marketing-intent re-ranking — so the AI is baked into the retrieval pipeline, not layered on top of it.

Merchandising depth. Searchspring is genuinely strong here. Its campaign scheduling, pinning, boosting rules, and A/B testing capabilities are mature and well-documented. Teams who have invested time in building out those workflows have real, functional search merchandising infrastructure. XTAL has merchandising controls but less depth in the GUI-driven rules engine. If your team runs complex manually-scheduled campaigns, Searchspring's track record is longer.

Deployment flexibility. XTAL ships as an embeddable <script> tag that intercepts your existing search input and renders results in an overlay, with no theme modifications required. Searchspring requires platform integration (Shopify connector, custom JavaScript, or API). For headless builds or stores where you can't touch the theme, the difference is meaningful.

The unified platform argument. With Intelligent Reach in the mix, Athos Commerce is building toward a broader ecommerce optimization suite — search, feeds, marketplace syndication, recommendations. If you need multiple of those modules, the bundled pricing of a unified platform can make financial sense over buying point solutions. XTAL is a focused search product; it does not try to be everything.

---

Pricing Comparison

Honest caveat upfront: neither XTAL nor Athos Commerce publishes all-in pricing without a sales conversation. Here is what is publicly known.

Athos Commerce (Searchspring):

Searchspring's publicly documented pricing before the merger started at $699/month for the Essential plan and $1,099/month for the Expert plan, billed annually. The Athos Commerce pricing page describes three tiers (Essential, Advanced, Expert) with usage-based pricing across domains, sessions, and SKUs, plus discounts for annual prepayment.

The catch is what reviewers consistently flag: the quote-based model means the starting price is rarely the landing price. Add-ons for advanced personalization, real-time indexing, A/B testing, and additional campaigns are layered on top. Multiple reviews on G2 and TrustRadius note that customers received significantly higher renewal quotes than their initial contract — one reviewer described pricing as "opaque, with extra add-ons that weren't clear at the start." Annual contract requirements mean you're committing for 12 months before you fully understand the TCO.

One practical note: the official Athos Commerce stance is that pricing is unchanged for equivalent features and tiers. But "equivalent" is doing work in that sentence — features that were part of your old Searchspring contract may land in a higher Athos tier when migration happens. Worth clarifying explicitly in any contract negotiation.

XTAL Search:

XTAL is also custom-quoted. Contact us for pricing details.

Bottom line for budget planning: If you are evaluating on cost, the most useful thing you can do is request a locked-price, three-year projection from both vendors that includes your expected session growth, any tier upgrades, and add-ons. Searchspring renewals have historically surprised customers on the upside; XTAL's pricing structure is worth comparing directly — contact us for a quote. The Searchspring comparison page has more detail on the contract structure.

---

Setup and Migration Path

Staying on Searchspring → Athos Commerce:

Athos Commerce promises a guided migration path with "dedicated support" and documented upgrade steps. The timeline for current Searchspring customers is Q1 2026 for general availability access. If your renewal falls before then, you are negotiating on the existing Searchspring platform with a platform migration on the near-term horizon. That is worth factoring into your contract term length — signing a two-year renewal now means you'll be migrated to the new platform mid-contract, at which point your configuration, rules, and workflows will need to be re-validated.

Some teams will find the migration relatively straightforward; others with extensive merchandising rule libraries will face meaningful re-implementation work. Athos Commerce has not yet published a detailed migration complexity estimator.

Switching to XTAL:

XTAL deploys as a <script> tag on your storefront. For Shopify stores, setup is a matter of adding the snippet to your theme — no app install, no connector configuration. The AI pipeline handles synonym management and query expansion automatically, which means there is no Searchspring-style synonym dictionary to re-build. Your product catalog is indexed via API or CSV upload; there is no dependency on your existing Searchspring data model.

For teams with extensive Searchspring merchandising campaigns — pinned products, scheduled promotions, custom boost rules — those workflows will not migrate automatically. That work needs to be replicated. For teams whose Searchspring configuration has grown organically and is partially orphaned (rules no one remembers creating), a migration is actually an opportunity to start clean with AI-driven defaults and only rebuild what demonstrably matters.

---

Who Should Stay vs. Switch

The honest answer is: it depends on how your team actually uses what Searchspring gives you.

Reasons to Stay with Athos Commerce

You rely heavily on merchandising rules. If your team runs scheduled campaigns, brand-specific boosting, or complex manual ranking configurations, Searchspring's merchandising tools are best-in-class for that workflow. The Athos Commerce platform is designed to preserve and extend that investment.

You need the full suite. If you are also a candidate for feed management (Intelligent Reach) or cross-sell recommendations, the bundled Athos Commerce roadmap offers a coherent path to consolidating multiple vendors.

Your Shopify integration is deeply customized. Searchspring has a mature Shopify connector with a large ecosystem of partner agencies who know how to customize it. If your current implementation was built by an agency, switching means re-educating or re-engaging that team.

Your contract has recently renewed. If you just signed or renewed, you are in the Athos migration path regardless. Optimize your current platform and evaluate again at the next renewal.

Reasons to Consider Switching to XTAL

You're hitting a pricing wall. If your current Searchspring bill has grown faster than your perceived value from the platform, or if you're facing a renewal quote that feels disconnected from results, this is the right moment to benchmark alternatives. XTAL's pricing is worth comparing directly — contact us for a quote.

You want AI-native search, not AI-adjacent. Searchspring's AI capabilities in the new Athos platform are largely inherited from Klevu and are still being unified. XTAL's LLM pipeline operates at the query level — every search request goes through semantic intent analysis before retrieval. If natural language queries ("something warm for a beach vacation under $80") are a meaningful part of your traffic, the difference in relevance is tangible.

You're on a headless or custom storefront. Searchspring's strength is its Shopify and Magento connectors. On a headless build, a bespoke storefront, or a multi-site setup where you can't rely on those connectors, XTAL's snippet-based deployment is materially easier to implement and maintain.

Your renewal is coming up and there's uncertainty. If you're within six months of renewal and the Athos Commerce migration timeline creates ambiguity about what platform you're actually renewing onto, that is a legitimate reason to evaluate the market. You don't have to switch — but you should negotiate from a position of having done the comparison.

You're evaluating from scratch and Searchspring is on the list. For a net-new evaluation with no prior Searchspring investment, XTAL's setup speed and AI-native pipeline make it a strong candidate for mid-market stores in the $5M–$100M revenue range.

---

Where XTAL Has an Edge for Mid-Market

Mid-market ecommerce teams — roughly $5M to $100M in revenue, Shopify or headless, without a dedicated search engineering function — are underserved by the enterprise-first assumptions baked into most of the market.

Searchspring was built for teams with the personnel to maintain it: someone to write merchandising rules, someone to manage the synonym dictionary, someone to interpret the analytics and act on them. That is a reasonable requirement for a $50M retailer with a 10-person digital team. It is a heavier lift for a 25-person DTC brand where the head of ecommerce is also managing paid media.

XTAL's AI pipeline shifts that balance. The LLM handles query augmentation, synonym expansion, and intent interpretation automatically. You spend less time maintaining the search configuration and more time reviewing results. The merchandising controls are there when you need them; you're not dependent on them to achieve baseline relevance.

The Searchspring comparison page goes deeper on the feature-by-feature breakdown. And for a broader look at the mid-market alternatives landscape, the algolia alternatives for ecommerce article covers eight platforms including several at the same price tier as Athos Commerce.

---

The Bottom Line

The Athos Commerce merger is real, the new platform is real, and the general availability in early 2026 is the current commitment. For existing Searchspring customers, staying is a reasonable choice if the platform is working and your team has built meaningful workflow investment on top of it. The migration path exists and is supported.

But a merger and platform transition is also a natural forcing function to ask whether the assumptions that drove the original Searchspring purchase still hold. If your traffic has grown and the pricing model has followed it upward, if you're looking for more AI capability without re-hiring for a search engineering role, or if you're on a headless build where the native connectors don't help you — this is the right moment to run the comparison.

Start with your baseline. Run a free search grade on your store and you'll have a concrete, vendor-neutral score to anchor any conversation — whether that conversation is about staying on Searchspring, negotiating your Athos renewal, or evaluating XTAL.