Guided scenario
Vector database for RAG
RAG and semantic search need a place to store embeddings and run fast nearest-neighbor lookups at scale. This shortlist ranks vector databases by managed-service convenience and hybrid vector-plus-keyword search, so AI teams ship retrieval without operating the index. Weigh indexing and filtering performance at your vector count, plus self-hosting options and how usage-based pricing scales.
Chroma
www.trychroma.com
Chroma is an open-source embedding database designed for building AI applications with retrieval, popular for prototyping and retrieval-augmented generation.
LanceDB
www.lancedb.com
LanceDB is an open-source, embedded vector database built on the Lance columnar format, combining vector, full-text (BM25), and SQL queries in one in-process system for multimodal data.
Marqo
www.marqo.ai
Marqo is an open-source, end-to-end vector and tensor search engine that handles embedding generation, storage, and retrieval through a single API, with a managed Marqo Cloud option.
pgvector
github.com/pgvector/pgvector
pgvector is an open-source PostgreSQL extension that adds vector data types and similarity-search indexes directly to a Postgres database, rather than being a standalone service.
Pinecone
www.pinecone.io
Pinecone is a managed vector database for storing and searching embeddings, used to power semantic search, recommendations, and retrieval for AI applications.
Qdrant
qdrant.tech
Qdrant is an open-source vector database and similarity-search engine written in Rust, available both self-hosted and as a managed service.
turbopuffer
turbopuffer.com
turbopuffer is a serverless vector and full-text search database built on object storage, designed for very large scale (billions of vectors) at low cost.
Vespa
vespa.ai
Vespa is an open-source platform for serving large-scale search, recommendation, and vector workloads with low latency, originally developed at Yahoo.
Weaviate
weaviate.io
Weaviate is an open-source vector database with built-in vectorization modules and strong hybrid search, available both self-hosted and as a managed service.
