Performance wise they seem pretty similar (althoug I couldn't find any up to date benchmarks), feature wise it depends on what you are looking for. Sphinx has a

Performance wise they seem pretty similar (althoug I couldn't find any up to date benchmarks), feature wise it depends on what you are looking for. Sphinx has aggregate support and lucene can update the index (sphinx can "only" merge deltas). If you don't use java already I would always go for sphinx, java adds allot of dependencies/"things you have to take care of". One neat feature added in this release is that you can connect to sphinx using any mysql client. So there is no need for a specialized client api and you can use it with everything (literally).