Algorithmic stemmers are typically four or five times faster than Hunspell stemmers. “Handcrafted” algorithmic stemmers are usually, but not always, faster than their Snowball equivalents. For instance, the porter_stem token filter is significantly faster than the Snowball implementation of the Porter stemmer.

Hunspell stemmers have to load all words, prefixes, and suffixes into memory, which can consume a few megabytes of RAM. Algorithmic stemmers, on the other hand, consist of a small amount of code and consume very little memory.

All languages, except Esperanto, are irregular. While more-formal words tend to follow a regular pattern, the most commonly used words often have irregular rules. Some stemming algorithms have been developed over years of research and produce reasonably high-quality results. Others have been assembled more quickly with less research and deal only with the most common cases.

While Hunspell offers the promise of dealing precisely with irregular words, it often falls short in practice. A dictionary stemmer is only as good as its dictionary. If Hunspell comes across a word that isn’t in its dictionary, it can do nothing with it. Hunspell requires an extensive, high-quality, up-to-date dictionary in order to produce good results; dictionaries of this caliber are few and far between. An algorithmic stemmer, on the other hand, will happily deal with new words that didn’t exist when the designer created the algorithm.

If a good algorithmic stemmer is available for your language, it makes sense to use it rather than Hunspell. It will be faster, will consume less memory, and will generally be as good or better than the Hunspell equivalent.

If accuracy and customizability is important to you, and you need (and have the resources) to maintain a custom dictionary, then Hunspell gives you greater flexibility than the algorithmic stemmers. (See Controlling Stemming for customization techniques that can be used with any stemmer.)

Different stemmers overstem and understem to a different degree. The light_ stemmers stem less aggressively than the standard stemmers, and the minimal_ stemmers less aggressively still. Hunspell stems aggressively.

Whether you want aggressive or light stemming depends on your use case. If your search results are being consumed by a clustering algorithm, you may prefer to match more widely (and, thus, stem more aggressively). If your search results are intended for human consumption, lighter stemming usually produces better results. Stemming nouns and adjectives is more important for search than stemming verbs, but this also depends on the language.

The other factor to take into account is the size of your document collection. With a small collection such as a catalog of 10,000 products, you probably want to stem more aggressively to ensure that you match at least some documents. If your collection is large, you likely will get good matches with lighter stemming.

Start out with a recommended stemmer. If it works well enough, there is no need to change it. If it doesn’t, you will need to spend some time investigating and comparing the stemmers available for language in order to find the one that best suits your purposes.