Vespa is an open-source platform for serving large-scale search, recommendation, and vector workloads with low latency, originally developed at Yahoo. It targets teams building demanding retrieval and ranking at scale and supports powerful hybrid search across vector, text, and structured data. The engine is open-source under Apache 2.0 and free to self-host, while Vespa Cloud offers a managed option with usage-based pricing and a trial. Its capability comes with a steeper learning curve, making it better suited to larger or more specialized teams than to quick prototyping. Vespa carries SOC2 and ISO27001 compliance.
open-sourceself-hostablesearchhybrid-searchmanaged
Overview
- Founded
- 2017
- Pricing tier
- Mid
- Startup-friendly
- No
- Enterprise-ready
- Yes
Vector database
- Free tier
- Yes: Open-source (self-host free); Vespa Cloud is managed (trial available).
- Serverless
- No
- Open-source
- Yes
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Managed service
- Yes
- Hybrid search
- Yes