head to head · open source
lancedb vs VectorDBBench
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. VectorDBBench has 1,178 stars, 439 forks, 184 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. lancedb leads on adoption by 874% (11,473 vs 1,178 stars). lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; VectorDBBench is written in Python under MIT. lancedb has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, VectorDBBench 37%. 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 | VectorDBBench | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 439 |
| 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 VectorDBBench if
- You want the VectorDBBench feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and VectorDBBench 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 VectorDBBench
VectorDBBench (VDBBench) is an MIT licensed Python benchmark tool for measuring the performance and cost effectiveness of vector databases and cloud vector services, built for anyone — including non professionals — who needs to reproduce existing benchmark results or test a new system before choosing it.
read the full VectorDBBench overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lancedb or VectorDBBench more popular?
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars and VectorDBBench has 1,178. lancedb has the larger community by that measure.
Are lancedb and VectorDBBench free?
Both are open source. lancedb is licensed under Apache-2.0 and VectorDBBench under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lancedb and VectorDBBench?
lancedb is written in Rust and VectorDBBench 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 VectorDBBench?
Choose lancedb if you want the larger community (11,473 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose VectorDBBench if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.