head to head · open source
Ollama vs lancedb
Ollama has 181,290 GitHub stars, 17,939 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lancedb has 11,473 stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 1,480% (181,290 vs 11,473 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Ollama has attracted 10% 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.
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Side by side
| Ollama | lancedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 181K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 Ollama
Ollama is a Go based, MIT licensed runtime that downloads and runs open source large language models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, GLM, MiniMax and gpt oss locally on a user's own machine, and it is aimed at developers and teams that want model inference without routing prompts through a hosted API.
read the full Ollama 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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or lancedb more popular?
Ollama has 181,290 GitHub stars and lancedb has 11,473. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and lancedb free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and lancedb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and lancedb?
Ollama is written in Go 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, Ollama or lancedb?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,290 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lancedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.