It has less features and worse performance than Solr and Sphinx. The worse performance is being worked on and will probably be fixed in 9.4 (the index guys clai

It has less features and worse performance than Solr and Sphinx. The worse performance is being worked on and will probably be fixed in 9.4 (the index guys claim that they can beat Sphinx in benchmarks). The advantage of having your fulltext search inside your database is huge though and can outweigh the current disadvantages. For example you do not have to manage another database, indexing can be transactional and instant, and you can can have both fulltext search and normal SQL stuff in the same query (often reducing latency).