head to head · open source
faiss vs Qdrant
faiss has 40,939 GitHub stars, 4,527 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Qdrant has 34,694 stars, 2,685 forks, 704 open issues and last shipped yesterday. faiss leads on adoption by 18% (40,939 vs 34,694 stars). faiss is written in C++ under MIT; Qdrant is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. faiss has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, Qdrant 8%. 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 | Qdrant | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 35K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.5K | ⑂ 2.7K |
| 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 Qdrant if
- You want the Qdrant feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Qdrant 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 Qdrant
Qdrant is a vector similarity search engine and database built in Rust, designed for production use in AI applications. It stores, manages, and retrieves high dimensional vectors alongside associated metadata (payloads), supporting fast nearest neighbor search with filtering. It solves the problem of efficiently performing semantic or neural based matching at scale—such as finding similar images, recommending content, or powering retrieval augmented generation (RAG)—by replacing slow or inflexible brute force or index based approaches with a purpose built engine optimized for vector operations.…
read the full Qdrant overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is faiss or Qdrant more popular?
faiss has 40,939 GitHub stars and Qdrant has 34,694. faiss has the larger community by that measure.
Are faiss and Qdrant free?
Both are open source. faiss is licensed under MIT and Qdrant under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between faiss and Qdrant?
faiss is written in C++ and Qdrant in Rust. 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 Qdrant?
Choose faiss if you want the larger community (40,939 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Qdrant if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.