head to head · open source
lancedb vs matrixone
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. matrixone has 1,888 stars, 312 forks, 745 open issues and last shipped today. lancedb leads on adoption by 508% (11,473 vs 1,888 stars). lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; matrixone is written in Go under Apache-2.0. lancedb has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, matrixone 17%. matrixone 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
| lancedb | matrixone | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 312 |
| 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 matrixone if
- You want the matrixone feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and matrixone 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 matrixone
MatrixOne is an AI native HTAP database written in Go that brings Git style version control to data and adds built in vector and full text search, built for teams shipping intelligent agents, RAG applications, and real time analytical workloads that would rather run one system than four.
read the full matrixone overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lancedb or matrixone more popular?
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars and matrixone has 1,888. lancedb has the larger community by that measure.
Are lancedb and matrixone free?
Both are open source. lancedb is licensed under Apache-2.0 and matrixone under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lancedb and matrixone?
lancedb is written in Rust and matrixone in Go. 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 matrixone?
Choose lancedb if you want the larger community (11,473 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose matrixone if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.