vector databases

ranked on licence terms you can actually ship on, filtering quality, what it really costs at your scale — and whether you need one at all.

5 listed · 5 researched by us · featured first, then most upvoted

pgvector

we checked thisfree — PostgreSQL License

the correct default for most teams, and it quietly got good

#almost-everyone-start-he#migrate-on-a-measured-th#not-a-vendor-s-table

Qdrant

we checked thisfree tier; cloud billed hourly on compute and storage

filtering built into the graph traversal, not bolted around it

#teams-who-genuinely-need#want-to-self-host-it

Milvus / Zilliz Cloud

we checked thisfree self-hosted; zilliz cloud billed per compute unit

the credible answer at a billion vectors

#100m-to-1bn-vectors#where-nothing-else-on-th

Elasticsearch

we checked thisserverless from $0.09 per search VCU-hour; storage $0.047/GB/month

the licence objection to using it for vectors is largely obsolete

#teams-already-running-el#anyone-who-needs-real-hy

Weaviate

we checked this$45 / month minimum; vector dimensions from $0.00465 per million

multi-tenancy and hybrid search, priced per million dimensions

#multi-tenant-saas-rag-wh

this page is deliberately short: a handful of vector databases we looked at properly, rather than everything that exists. if you build one that belongs here, a free listing takes two minutes and $50 pins it to the top of this page.

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