head to head · open source
faiss vs lancedb
faiss has 40,939 GitHub stars, 4,527 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lancedb has 11,473 stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. faiss leads on adoption by 257% (40,939 vs 11,473 stars). faiss is written in C++ under MIT; lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. faiss has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, lancedb 9%. lancedb 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| faiss | lancedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.5K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 lancedb if
- You want the lancedb 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 lancedb 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 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 →
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More Machine Learning Infrastructure projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Machine Learning Infrastructure field.
Frequently asked questions
Is faiss or lancedb more popular?
faiss has 40,939 GitHub stars and lancedb has 11,473. faiss has the larger community by that measure.
Are faiss and lancedb free?
Both are open source. faiss is licensed under MIT and lancedb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between faiss and lancedb?
faiss is written in C++ and lancedb 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 lancedb?
Choose faiss if you want the larger community (40,939 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lancedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.