head to head · open source
faiss vs dagster
faiss has 40,929 GitHub stars, 4,526 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagster has 16,168 stars, 2,294 forks, 2,589 open issues and last shipped yesterday. faiss leads on adoption by 153% (40,929 vs 16,168 stars). faiss is written in C++ under MIT; dagster is written in Python under Apache-2.0. faiss has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, dagster 14%. faiss was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| faiss | dagster | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 16K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.5K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick faiss if
- You weight community size — 41K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dagster if
- You want the dagster feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and dagster fits your workflow better
About faiss
Faiss is an MIT licensed C++ library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors, with complete Python and NumPy wrappers, developed primarily at Meta's Fundamental AI Research group, and it is intended for engineers and researchers who need nearest neighbour search over vector sets that range from small collections to sets that possibly do not fit in RAM.
read the full faiss overview →
About dagster
Dagster is a cloud native data pipeline orchestrator written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 licence, built for data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning teams who declare the tables, data sets, models, and reports their pipelines should produce and need those assets tested, observable, and kept up to date from local development through production.
read the full dagster overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is faiss or dagster more popular?
faiss has 40,929 GitHub stars and dagster has 16,168. faiss has the larger community by that measure.
Are faiss and dagster free?
Both are open source. faiss is licensed under MIT and dagster under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between faiss and dagster?
faiss is written in C++ and dagster in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, faiss or dagster?
Choose faiss if you want the larger community (40,929 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose dagster if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.