head to head · open source
Ollama vs faiss
Ollama has 185,702 GitHub stars, 18,873 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. faiss has 41,251 stars, 4,584 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Ollama leads on adoption by 350% (185,702 vs 41,251 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; faiss is written in C++ under MIT. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, faiss 11%. Ollama 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 | faiss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 186K | ★ 41K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 19K | ⑂ 4.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 186K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick faiss if
- You want the faiss feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and faiss fits your workflow better
About Ollama
Ollama Start building with open models. Download macOS or download manually Windows or download manually Linux Manual install instructions Docker The official Ollama Docker image ollama/ollama is available on Docker Hub. Libraries ollama python ollama js Community Discord 𝕏 (Twitter) Reddit Get started You'll be prompted to run a model or connect Ollama to your existing agents or applications such as Claude Code , OpenClaw , OpenCode , Codex , Copilot , and more. Coding To launch a specific integration: Supported integrations include Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI, DeepSeek Harness, Droid, and OpenCode. AI…
read the full Ollama overview →
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…
read the full faiss overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or faiss more popular?
Ollama has 185,702 GitHub stars and faiss has 41,251. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and faiss free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and faiss under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and faiss?
Ollama is written in Go and faiss in C++. 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 faiss?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (185,702 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose faiss if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.