Overview

Recombee is a recommendation and personalized-search platform for teams building digital products around changing catalogs and user behavior. It is best suited to businesses with enough activity and technical capacity to shape recommendations around their own rules. Its combination of real-time personalization, semantic search, and configurable controls is compelling, but the right plan depends on how quickly catalog and usage volumes grow.

Key features

The engine updates recommendations in response to user interactions and catalog changes, which suits businesses whose content or products move quickly. Personalized semantic search broadens the offering beyond recommendation slots; teams can use both to tailor how people discover items.

Scenario settings, filters, boosters, constraints, and ReQL let customers influence recommendation behavior and encode business rules. That flexibility is valuable when a generic ranking is not enough, though it puts the burden on a team to decide how results should be shaped. The Admin UI offers customizable reports and insights into user interactions with recommendations and the platform, giving teams a way to examine engagement and system activity.

Developers can connect through a REST API, SDK clients in multiple languages, catalog feeds, and no-code widgets. Official plugins are available for Keboola and Segment; community plugins cover WordPress, Drupal, Laravel, Kentico, Kentico Kontent, and n8n. That mix offers several integration routes, but official and community plugins should not be treated as equivalent support commitments.

Recombee says it handles over 30,000 recommendations per second, supports catalogs with tens of millions of items, and recommends over a billion items per day. Those stated scale figures make the platform relevant to large catalogs as well as smaller ones, although the lower plans have much tighter quotas. Its security measures include pseudonymized customer data, physical and software safeguards, routine penetration testing, monitored and logged database access, and processing servers in the EU.

Pricing

Recombee has a free plan, paid plans starting at $99/mo, and an unlimited 30-day trial. After the trial, customers can upgrade or continue on the free plan. The caps make the free tier useful for an initial deployment or a small service, not for a catalog or audience growing beyond its limits.

Plan	Price	Monthly limits
Free	0.00 USD per free, billed Forever	Under 100,000 interactions; under 100,000 recommendation requests; under 20,000 active users; under 20,000 catalog items
Standard	99.00 USD per month, starting at /mo	100,000 interactions; 100,000 recommendation requests; 20,000 active users; 20,000 catalog items
Pro	1699.00 USD per month, starting at /mo	5,000,000 interactions; 5,000,000 recommendation requests; 1,000,000 active users; 1,000,000 catalog items
Premium	4499.00 USD per month, starting at /mo	At least 20,000,000 interactions; at least 20,000,000 recommendation requests; at least 4,000,000 active users; at least 4,000,000 catalog items

Standard is the paid entry point for a service staying around 100,000 monthly interactions and requests and a 20,000-item catalog. Pro is a substantial step up in both price and capacity, suited to services with up to 5 million interactions and requests and a million active users or items. Premium starts at $4499.00 USD per month for much higher stated volumes. These prices are starting points, so teams approaching the plan ceilings should confirm fit before committing. The event ingestion limit is 100,000 per month, a material constraint to check against the expected event flow. Plan features also include customer-support tiers, mail, availability guarantees, account management, video calls, a Slack channel, integration support, and data science support.

Platforms

Recombee supports Android, iOS, web, and API access. Its omnichannel support makes it relevant to teams serving people across more than one digital touchpoint.

Who it's for

Recombee targets video, e-commerce, news and media, deal aggregators, music and podcasts, sports and live events, real estate, marketplaces, travel, and recruitment. It is a strong candidate for businesses in those fields that need recommendations and search to adapt to behavior and catalog changes, and can make use of configurable business rules. A small project with modest needs may prefer the free tier; a team that cannot accommodate the paid-plan jump from $99.00 to $1699.00 per month should pay close attention to the free and Standard ceilings.

Pros and cons

Pros

Recommendations and personalized semantic search are combined, so teams can address both ranking and discovery in one platform.
Filters, boosters, constraints, and ReQL allow business rules to shape recommendation behavior rather than leaving teams with a fixed approach.
The free tier and unlimited 30-day trial provide room to start before taking on a paid plan.
API, SDKs, feeds, widgets, and a range of plugins give teams multiple integration paths.
Reported capacity for large catalogs and high recommendation volumes makes it a credible option for substantial services.

Cons

Standard is capped at 100,000 monthly interactions and requests and 20,000 catalog items, so services that outgrow those limits face a sharp price jump to Pro.
The 100,000-per-month event ingestion limit needs to be checked against expected activity.
Community plugins are not the same as official plugins, which may matter to teams relying on a specific integration.
The platform's rule controls and developer interfaces favor teams able to configure a tailored implementation over buyers seeking a narrowly packaged tool.

Alternatives

Wiser AI is worth considering for a smaller order-driven shop: its free plan covers up to 50 orders, and a paid tier starts at 9.00 USD per month for 51–100 orders.

Alterable offers a free forever plan with 10,000 impressions per month and local maps for up to 10 locations, making it a different low-volume option.

Personyze may suit teams looking for campaigns and AI tasks under a free tier, which allows 5k pageviews, one domain, three active campaigns, and eight AI tasks a month; its Starter plan is 149.00 USD per month.

Barilliance is another web-based paid alternative, with its Live! plan starting at 250.00 per month.

LimeSpot is a paid alternative with a 19.99 USD-per-month Turbo plan for up to 250 orders per 30 days from an online store channel; that plan is not available to Shopify Plus stores.

Salesforce Account Engagement is a web-based paid alternative whose Growth+ plan costs 1250.00 USD per month on an annual contract and includes 10,000 contacts.

Bloomreach Content is a paid web, iOS, and Android alternative.

Kimonix Ecommerce Personalization is another paid option, with Agentic Search priced at 5.90 USD per month plus per-answer and per-search usage charges and a seven-day free trial.

For broader comparisons, see Personalization Software and Email Personalization Software.

Verdict

Choose Recombee if your business needs recommendations and personalized search that respond to customer behavior, with controls to tune results to its rules and a catalog that may scale substantially. The free plan and 30-day trial lower the barrier to starting, but the quotas and steep move from Standard to Pro make growth planning essential. Look elsewhere if your expected activity already exceeds Standard's limits or if your needs do not justify a configurable recommendation platform.

	Optimizely Personalization	Recombee
Free plan	No	Yes
Free trial	No	Yes
Paid from	—	$99/mo
Open source	No	No
Platforms	Web	Android, api, iOS, Web
Experimentation	Yes	—
Free plan	—	Yes
Paid from	—	99 /mo

Optimizely Personalization vs Recombee

Optimizely Personalization

Recombee