head to head · open source
lancedb vs qdrant-client
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. qdrant-client has 1,359 stars, 304 forks, 191 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lancedb leads on adoption by 744% (11,473 vs 1,359 stars). lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; qdrant-client is written in Python under Apache-2.0. lancedb has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, qdrant-client 22%. lancedb was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | qdrant-client | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 304 |
| 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 qdrant-client if
- You want the qdrant-client feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and qdrant-client 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 qdrant-client
qdrant client is the official Python client library and SDK for the Qdrant vector search engine, aimed at Python developers who need to create, populate, and query vector collections from scripts, notebooks, services, and pipelines.
read the full qdrant-client overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lancedb or qdrant-client more popular?
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars and qdrant-client has 1,359. lancedb has the larger community by that measure.
Are lancedb and qdrant-client free?
Both are open source. lancedb is licensed under Apache-2.0 and qdrant-client under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lancedb and qdrant-client?
lancedb is written in Rust and qdrant-client in Python. 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 qdrant-client?
Choose lancedb if you want the larger community (11,473 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose qdrant-client if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.