Is Orama free to use?

Orama is open source. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

Full-text & vector search at the edge.

What is Orama written in?

Orama is primarily written in TypeScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/oramasearch/orama, and it has 10,555 GitHub stars.

Orama: Open Source Databases — 11K★ on GitHub

If you need more info, help, or want to provide general feedback on Orama, join the Orama Slack channel

Highlighted features

Installation

You can install Orama using npm, yarn, pnpm, bun:

npm i @orama/orama

Or import it directly in a browser module:

<html>
  <body>
    <script type="module">
      import { create, insert, search } from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@orama/orama@latest/+esm'
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

With Deno, you can just use the same CDN URL or use npm specifiers:

import { create, search, insert } from 'npm:@orama/orama'

Read the complete documentation at https://docs.orama.com.

Orama Features

Usage

Orama is quite simple to use. The first thing to do is to create a new database instance and set an indexing schema:

import { create, insert, remove, search, searchVector } from '@orama/orama'

const db = create({
  schema: {
    name: 'string',
    description: 'string',
    price: 'number',
    embedding: 'vector[1536]', // Vector size must be expressed during schema initialization
    meta: {
      rating: 'number',
    },
  },
})

insert(db, {
  name: 'Noise cancelling headphones',
  description: 'Best noise cancelling headphones on the market',
  price: 99.99,
  embedding: [0.2432, 0.9431, 0.5322, 0.4234, ...],
  meta: {
    rating: 4.5
  }
})

const results = search(db, {
  term: 'Best headphones'
})

// {
//   elapsed: {
//     raw: 21492,
//     formatted: '21μs',
//   },
//   hits: [
//     {
//       id: '41013877-56',
//       score: 0.925085832971998432,
//       document: {
//         name: 'Noise cancelling headphones',
//         description: 'Best noise cancelling headphones on the market',
//         price: 99.99,
//         embedding: [0.2432, 0.9431, 0.5322, 0.4234, ...],
//         meta: {
//           rating: 4.5
//         }
//       }
//     }
//   ],
//   count: 1
// }

Orama currently supports 10 different data types:

Type	Description	Example
`string`	A string of characters.	`'Hello world'`
`number`	A numeric value, either float or integer.	`42`
`boolean`	A boolean value.	`true`
`enum`	An enum value.	`'drama'`
`geopoint`	A geopoint value.	`{ lat: 40.7128, lon: 74.0060 }`
`string[]`	An array of strings.	`['red', 'green', 'blue']`
`number[]`	An array of numbers.	`[42, 91, 28.5]`
`boolean[]`	An array of booleans.	`[true, false, false]`
`enum[]`	An array of enums.	`['comedy', 'action', 'romance']`
`vector[]`	A vector of numbers to perform vector search on.	`[0.403, 0.192, 0.830]`

Vector and Hybrid Search Support

Orama supports both vector and hybrid search by just setting mode: 'vector' when performing search.

To perform this kind of search, you'll need to provide text embeddings at search time:

import { create, insertMultiple, search } from '@orama/orama'

const db = create({
  schema: {
    title: 'string',
    embedding: 'vector[5]', // we are using a 5-dimensional vector.
  },
});

insertMultiple(db, [
  { title: 'The Prestige', embedding: [0.938293, 0.284951, 0.348264, 0.948276, 0.56472] },
  { title: 'Barbie', embedding: [0.192839, 0.028471, 0.284738, 0.937463, 0.092827] },
  { title: 'Oppenheimer', embedding: [0.827391, 0.927381, 0.001982, 0.983821, 0.294841] },
])

const results = search(db, {
  // Search mode. Can be 'vector', 'hybrid', or 'fulltext'
  mode: 'vector',
  vector: {
    // The vector (text embedding) to use for search
    value: [0.938292, 0.284961, 0.248264, 0.748276, 0.26472],
    // The schema property where Orama should compare embeddings
    property: 'embedding',
  },
  // Minimum similarity to determine a match. Defaults to `0.8`
  similarity: 0.85,
  // Defaults to `false`. Setting to 'true' will return the embeddings in the response (which can be very large).
  includeVectors: true,
})

Have trouble generating embeddings for vector and hybrid search? Try our @orama/plugin-embeddings plugin!

import { create } from '@orama/orama'
import { pluginEmbeddings } from '@orama/plugin-embeddings'
import '@tensorflow/tfjs-node' // Or any other appropriate TensorflowJS backend, like @tensorflow/tfjs-backend-webgl

const plugin = await pluginEmbeddings({
  embeddings: {
    // Schema property used to store generated embeddings
    defaultProperty: 'embeddings',
    onInsert: {
      // Generate embeddings at insert-time
      generate: true,
      // properties to use for generating embeddings at insert time.
      // Will be concatenated to generate a unique embedding.
      properties: ['description'],
      verbose: true,
    }
  }
})

const db = create({
  schema: {
    description: 'string',
    // Orama generates 512-dimensions vectors.
    // When using @orama/plugin-embeddings, set the property where you want to store embeddings as `vector[512]`.
    embeddings: 'vector[512]'
  },
  plugins: [plugin]
})

// Orama will generate and store embeddings at insert-time!
await insert(db, { description: 'Classroom Headphones Bulk 5 Pack, Student On Ear Color Varieties' })
await insert(db, { description: 'Kids Wired Headphones for School Students K-12' })
await insert(db, { description: 'Kids Headphones Bulk 5-Pack for K-12 School' })
await insert(db, { description: 'Bose QuietComfort Bluetooth Headphones' })

// Orama will also generate

What is Orama?

What it is

Key capabilities

Who uses it and how

Getting started

When to use it — and when not to