head to head · open source
lancedb vs dingo
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dingo has 1,704 stars, 264 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. lancedb leads on adoption by 573% (11,473 vs 1,704 stars). lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; dingo is written in Java under Apache-2.0. lancedb has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, dingo 15%. lancedb was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (vector-database), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| lancedb | dingo | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-07-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 264 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lancedb if
- You weight community size — 11K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dingo if
- You want the dingo feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and dingo fits your workflow better
About lancedb
LanceDB is an open source, developer friendly embedded retrieval library for multimodal AI, maintained in Rust and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It describes itself as a multimodal AI lakehouse: a single place where developers can build, train and analyze AI workloads over vectors, metadata and multimodal data such as text, images, videos and point clouds. It is built on top of the Lance columnar format, which provides the storage layer for efficient storage and analytics.
read the full lancedb overview →
About dingo
DingoDB is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Java based distributed multi modal vector database from DataCanvas that unifies relational and vector semantics behind a MySQL compatible SQL interface, built for teams that need hybrid scalar and vector queries over structured and unstructured data at high concurrency and ultra low latency.
read the full dingo overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lancedb or dingo more popular?
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars and dingo has 1,704. lancedb has the larger community by that measure.
Are lancedb and dingo free?
Both are open source. lancedb is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dingo under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lancedb and dingo?
lancedb is written in Rust and dingo in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, lancedb or dingo?
Choose lancedb if you want the larger community (11,473 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dingo if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.