head to head · open source
faiss vs lancedb
faiss has 41,256 GitHub stars, 4,586 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lancedb has 11,841 stars, 1,150 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. faiss leads on adoption by 248% (41,256 vs 11,841 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 10%. 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.
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Side by side
| faiss | lancedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.6K | ⑂ 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 Faiss is a library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors. It contains algorithms that search in sets of vectors of any size, up to ones that possibly do not fit in RAM. It also contains supporting code for evaluation and parameter tuning. Faiss is written in C++ with complete wrappers for Python/numpy. Some of the most useful algorithms are implemented on the GPU. It is developed primarily at Meta's Fundamental AI Research group. News See CHANGELOG.md for detailed information about latest features. Introduction Faiss contains several methods for similarity search. It assumes that…
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About lancedb
The Multimodal AI Lakehouse How to Install ✦ Detailed Documentation ✦ Tutorials and Recipes ✦ Contributors The ultimate multimodal data platform for AI/ML applications. LanceDB is designed for fast, scalable, and production ready vector search. It is built on top of the Lance columnar format. You can store, index, and search over petabytes of multimodal data and vectors with ease. LanceDB is a central location where developers can build, train and analyze their AI workloads. Demo: Multimodal Search by Keyword, Vector or with SQL Star LanceDB to get updates! ⭐ Click here ⭐ to see how fast we're growing! Key…
read the full lancedb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is faiss or lancedb more popular?
faiss has 41,256 GitHub stars and lancedb has 11,841. 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 (41,256 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lancedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.