head to head · open source
lancedb vs endee
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. endee has 1,295 stars, 1,650 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. lancedb leads on adoption by 786% (11,473 vs 1,295 stars). lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; endee is written in C++ under AGPL-3.0. lancedb has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, endee 127%. lancedb was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (image-search, 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 | endee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-07-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 endee if
- You want the endee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and endee 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 endee
Endee is a C++ vector database and AI search and intelligence platform for teams that need dense, sparse, and filtered retrieval on up to one billion vectors from a single node, available as self hosted software under AGPL 3.0 or as a hosted service.
read the full endee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lancedb or endee more popular?
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars and endee has 1,295. lancedb has the larger community by that measure.
Are lancedb and endee free?
Both are open source. lancedb is licensed under Apache-2.0 and endee under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lancedb and endee?
lancedb is written in Rust and endee 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, lancedb or endee?
Choose lancedb if you want the larger community (11,473 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose endee if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.