pgvector
the correct default for most teams, and it quietly got good
free, permissive, runs on every managed postgres, and the only option here that can update an embedding and its parent row in one transaction.
the case for pgvector is not that it wins benchmarks. it is that it adds no new system to operate, costs nothing, and keeps your embeddings transactionally consistent with the business data they describe. no dedicated vector database can do that second thing at all.
the historical objection was filtered search. before version 0.8.0 a query with a selective WHERE clause could silently return fewer than k results — the index returned its candidates, the filter removed most of them, and you got quiet recall collapse. iterative index scans fixed exactly that in october 2024. every comparison written before then is testing a materially different product, and a lot of the folklore about pgvector dates from that era.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- vector databases
- pricing
- free — PostgreSQL License
- website
- github.com
free, permissive, runs on every managed postgres, and the only option here that can update an embedding and its parent row in one transaction.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.