Qdrant is a free, open source databases project written in Rust and released under Apache-2.0. It has 34,638 GitHub stars, 2,680 forks and 704 open issues, and was last pushed 5 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #12 of 81 tracked projects in Databases, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 127 stars over the last 6 tracked days.

Qdrant — Fast, scalable vector database for AI applications

What is Qdrant?

What it is

Qdrant is a vector similarity search engine and database built in Rust, designed for production use in AI applications. It stores, manages, and retrieves high-dimensional vectors alongside associated metadata (payloads), supporting fast nearest-neighbor search with filtering. It solves the problem of efficiently performing semantic or neural-based matching at scale—such as finding similar images, recommending content, or powering retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)—by replacing slow or inflexible brute-force or index-based approaches with a purpose-built engine optimized for vector operations.

Key capabilities

  • Supports HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) indexing for fast approximate nearest-neighbor search
  • Provides extended filtering on vector payloads (e.g., filtering by tags, timestamps, or categories during search)
  • Enables hybrid search by combining keyword and vector similarity in a single query
  • Offers built-in support for quantization (scalar, product, binary) to reduce memory usage and improve throughput
  • Includes Qdrant Edge, a lightweight, embeddable library for local, offline vector search on resource-constrained devices
  • Supports sharding and replication for horizontal scaling and high availability
  • Exposes a REST/gRPC API and official client libraries for Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET, and Java

Who uses it and how

  • AI/ML engineers deploy Qdrant as the backend for RAG systems, storing document embeddings and retrieving relevant context for LLMs
  • Product teams use it for semantic search in e-commerce or content platforms, matching user queries to product descriptions or articles
  • Developers build recommendation engines by computing similarity between user/item embeddings and serving top matches in real time
  • Edge compute teams embed Qdrant Edge directly into mobile or IoT applications for offline vector search with local data persistence

Getting started

Run the official Docker image qdrant/qdrant on port 6333; connect via Python using qdrant-client or other official SDKs. For production, configure authentication and TLS per the security guide. Qdrant Cloud offers a managed hosted option with a free tier at https://cloud.qdrant.io/.

When to use it — and when not to

Qdrant replaces paid vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate) with a self-hosted, high-performance alternative, but requires operational overhead for persistence, backups, and scaling. It is unsuitable for workloads needing ACID transactions, relational joins, or SQL querying—its focus is purely on vector similarity and payload filtering. Avoid it if your application requires low-latency updates across millions of vectors without batching, or if you lack infrastructure resources to manage a Rust-based service (e.g., no container orchestration, limited Rust expertise).

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Qdrant

Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI applications

Tests status OpenAPI Docs Apache 2.0 License Discord Roadmap 2025 Qdrant Cloud

Qdrant (read: quadrant) is a vector similarity search engine and vector database. It provides a production-ready service with a convenient API to store, search, and manage points—vectors with an additional payload. Qdrant is tailored for extended filtering support, making it useful for all sorts of neural-network or semantic-based matching, faceted search, and other applications.

Qdrant is written in Rust 🦀, which makes it fast and reliable even under high load. See benchmarks.

With Qdrant, embeddings or neural network encoders can be turned into full-fledged applications for matching, searching, recommending, and much more!

Qdrant is also available as a fully managed Qdrant Cloud ⛅ including a free tier.

Quick StartAgent SkillsClient LibrariesDemo ProjectsIntegrationsContact

Getting Started

Agent Skills

Qdrant provides a collection of ready-to-use agent skills that bring Qdrant's vector search capabilities directly into your AI coding assistant. Install these skills to empower your agent in making critical engineering decisions for optimal vector search performance, such as quantization, sharding, tenant isolation, hybrid search, model migration, and more.

Client-Server

To experience the full power of Qdrant locally, run the container with this command:

docker run -p 6333:6333 qdrant/qdrant

Note that this starts an insecure deployment without authentication, open to all network interfaces. Please refer to secure your instance.

Now you can connect to the server with any client. For example, using Python:

from qdrant_client import QdrantClient

client = QdrantClient(url="http://localhost:6333")

Before deploying Qdrant to production, be sure to read our installation and security guides.

Clients

Qdrant offers the following client libraries to help you integrate it into your application stack:

Qdrant Edge

Qdrant Edge is a lightweight version of Qdrant designed for edge devices and resource-constrained environments. Unlike Qdrant Server, which uses a client-server architecture, Qdrant Edge runs inside the application process. Data is stored and queried locally and can be synchronized with a Qdrant server. It offers the same powerful vector search capabilities as the client-server version but with a smaller footprint, making it ideal for applications that require low latency and offline functionality.

To get started with Qdrant Edge from Python or Rust, initialize an instance of EdgeShard, which exposes methods to manage data, query it, and restore snapshots. For example:

from qdrant_edge import Distance, EdgeConfig, EdgeVectorParams, EdgeShard, Point, UpdateOperation

shard = EdgeShard.create("./shard", EdgeConfig(
    vectors={"my-vector": EdgeVectorParams(size=4, distance=Distance.Cosine)}
))
shard.update(UpdateOperation.upsert_points([
    Point(id=1, vector={"my-vector": [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4]}, payload={"color": "red"})
]))

Where Do I Go from Here?

Demo Projects

Discover Semantic Text Search 🔍

Unlock the power of semantic embeddings with Qdrant, transcending keyword-based search to find meaningful connections in short texts. Deploy a neural search in minutes using a pre-trained neural network, and experience the future of text search. Try it online!

Explore Similar Image Search - Food Discovery 🍕

There's more to discovery than text search, especially when it comes to food. People often choose meals based on appearance rather than descriptions and ingredients. Let Qdrant help your users find their next delicious meal using visual search, even if they don't know the dish's name. Check it out!

Master Extreme Classification - E-Commerce Product Categorization 📺

Enter the cutting-edge realm of extreme classification, an emerging machine learning field tackling multi-class and multi-label problems with millions of labels. Harness the potential of similarity learning models, and see how a pre-trained transformer model and Qdrant can revolutionize e-commerce product categorization. Play with it online!

API

REST

Qdrant provides a REST API with an OpenAPI 3.0 specification, enabling client generation for virtually any framework or programming language.

You can also download the raw OpenAPI definitions.

gRPC

For faster, production-tier searches, Qdrant also provides a gRPC interface.

Features

Dense, Sparse, and Multi Vector Search

Qdrant supports dense vectors for semantic similarity, sparse vectors for full-text search, and multivector search for objects with multiple embeddings or late interaction models like ColBERT.

Filtering on Payload

Attach any JSON payload to your vectors and filter on it using a rich set of conditions—keyword matching, full-text, numeric ranges, geo-locations, and more—combined with should, must, and must_not clauses.

Hybrid Search

Combine multiple vectors in a single query to get the best of semantic understanding and keyword precision, with results merged via configurable fusion strategies, such as Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) and Distribution-Based Score Fusion (DBSF).

Vector Quantization and On-Disk Storage

Built-in quantization cuts RAM usage by up to 97% and lets you tune the trade-off between search speed and precision.

Distributed Deployment

Scale horizontally with sharding and replication, and update or resize collections with zero downtime.

Highlighted Features

  • Faceting - aggregate search results by payload values.
  • Recommendation - use positive and negative examples to find similar points.
  • Discovery - constrain search to a specific region of the vector space.
  • Search Relevance Tuning - tools for adjusting search results, such as

readme truncated — read the full docs on github

Frequently asked questions

Is Qdrant free to use?

Qdrant is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. 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.

What does Qdrant do?

Fast, scalable vector database for AI applications

What is Qdrant written in?

Qdrant is primarily written in Rust. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant, and it has 34,638 GitHub stars.