head to head · open source

llama.cpp vs faiss

llama.cpp has 128,619 GitHub stars, 23,351 forks, 2,464 open issues and last shipped yesterday. faiss has 40,929 stars, 4,526 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped yesterday. llama.cpp leads on adoption by 214% (128,619 vs 40,929 stars). llama.cpp is written in C++ under MIT; faiss is written in C++ under MIT. llama.cpp has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, faiss 11%. 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.

llama.cpp ★ 129K faiss ★ 41K category AI & Machine Learning

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Side by side

	llama.cpp	faiss
GitHub stars	★ 129K	★ 41K
License	MIT	MIT
Written in	C++	C++
Last push	2026-09-18	2026-09-18
Forks	⑂ 23K	⑂ 4.5K
Self-hosting	Yes	Yes
Data ownership	Your server	Your server

pick llama.cpp if

You weight community size — 129K stars and counting
You want the MIT license terms
Your stack matches C++
You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance

full llama.cpp profile →

pick faiss if

You want the faiss feature set and don't need the biggest community
You prefer the MIT license terms
Your stack matches C++
You evaluated both and faiss fits your workflow better

full faiss profile →

About llama.cpp

llama.cpp is a C/C++ library and set of command line tools for running large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) locally. It enables inference without external dependencies, targeting diverse hardware including Apple Silicon, x86 CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs (via CUDA), AMD GPUs (via HIP), and other accelerators. The project lives in the ggml ecosystem, leveraging the ggml tensor computation library for low level operations and quantized model execution.

read the full llama.cpp overview →

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 →

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Frequently asked questions

Is llama.cpp or faiss more popular?

llama.cpp has 128,619 GitHub stars and faiss has 40,929. llama.cpp has the larger community by that measure.

Are llama.cpp and faiss free?

Both are open source. llama.cpp is licensed under MIT and faiss under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.

What is the difference between llama.cpp and faiss?

llama.cpp is written in C++ and faiss in C++. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.

Which should I choose, llama.cpp or faiss?

Choose llama.cpp if you want the larger community (128,619 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose faiss if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.