head to head · open source
txtai vs paradedb
txtai has 12,964 GitHub stars, 891 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. paradedb has 9,289 stars, 458 forks, 193 open issues and last shipped today. txtai leads on adoption by 40% (12,964 vs 9,289 stars). txtai is written in Python under Apache-2.0; paradedb is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. txtai has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, paradedb 5%. paradedb 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
| txtai | paradedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 13K | ★ 9.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-15 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 891 | ⑂ 458 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick txtai if
- You weight community size — 13K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick paradedb if
- You want the paradedb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and paradedb fits your workflow better
About txtai
txtai is an all in one AI framework for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows, written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Python machine learning ecosystem and is built on Hugging Face Transformers, Sentence Transformers and FastAPI. The core component is an embeddings database, which is a union of vector indexes (both sparse and dense), graph networks and relational databases. That foundation enables vector search and also serves as a knowledge source for large language model applications.
read the full txtai overview →
About paradedb
ParadeDB is an AGPL 3.0 PostgreSQL extension, written in Rust and distributed from the paradedb repository, that upgrades Postgres with full text search, BM25 scoring, vector retrieval, and aggregations so application data and the search engine live in one database — intended for teams that would otherwise deploy and sync a separate search system.
read the full paradedb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is txtai or paradedb more popular?
txtai has 12,964 GitHub stars and paradedb has 9,289. txtai has the larger community by that measure.
Are txtai and paradedb free?
Both are open source. txtai is licensed under Apache-2.0 and paradedb under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between txtai and paradedb?
txtai is written in Python and paradedb 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, txtai or paradedb?
Choose txtai if you want the larger community (12,964 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose paradedb if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.