head to head · open source
Ollama vs faiss
Ollama has 181,184 GitHub stars, 17,921 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. faiss has 40,929 stars, 4,526 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 343% (181,184 vs 40,929 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; faiss is written in C++ under MIT. Ollama has attracted 10% 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.
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Side by side
| Ollama | faiss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 41K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 4.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 181K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
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
About Ollama
Ollama is a Go based, MIT licensed runtime that downloads and runs open source large language models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, GLM, MiniMax and gpt oss locally on a user's own machine, and it is aimed at developers and teams that want model inference without routing prompts through a hosted API.
read the full Ollama 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 Ollama or faiss more popular?
Ollama has 181,184 GitHub stars and faiss has 40,929. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and faiss free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and faiss under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and faiss?
Ollama is written in Go 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, Ollama or faiss?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,184 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose faiss if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.