Elastic vs. LanceDB
Compare Elastic vs. LanceDB by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.
Elastic vs. LanceDB on Scalability
Yes.
No. Only scale at the server level.
Static sharding
No (static data sharding coming soon)
Elastic scalability
With static sharding, if your data grows beyond the capacity of your server, you will need to add more machines to the cluster and re-shard all of your data. This can be a time-consuming and complex process. Additionally, imbalanced shards can introduce bottlenecks and reduce the efficiency of your system.
LanceDB
LanceDB is an open-source vector database that's designed to store, manage, query and retrieve embeddings on multi-modal data. LanceDB and its underlying data format, Lance, are built to scale to really large amounts of data (hundreds of terabytes, 200M+ vectors).
Elastic vs. LanceDB on Functionality
Performance is the biggest challenge with vector databases as the number of unstructured data elements stored in a vector database grows into hundreds of millions or billions, and horizontal scaling across multiple nodes becomes paramount.
Furthermore, differences in insert rate, query rate, and underlying hardware may result in different application needs, making overall system tunability a mandatory feature for vector databases.
Yes. (combine vector and traditional search)
Yes, vector search & keyword search
1 (HNSW)
IVF-PQ, HNSW
(LanceDB adopts a disk-based indexing philosophy.)
Elastic functionality
Elasticsearch uses reverse index and builds vector search capability on top of the exsting search architecture. Elasticsearch is good at text search, but the whole architecture is not purpose-built for vector search.
Elastic vs. LanceDB on Purpose-built
What’s your vector database for?
A vector database is a fully managed solution for storing, indexing, and searching across a massive dataset of unstructured data that leverages the power of embeddings from machine learning models. A vector database should have the following features:
- Scalability and tunability
- Multi-tenancy and data isolation
- A complete suite of APIs
- An intuitive user interface/administrative console
Python, Java, Go, C++, Node.js, Rust, Ruby, .NET (C#), PHP, Perl
Python, Javascript/Typescript, and Rust
Elastic vs. LanceDB: what’s right for me?
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene and was first released in 2010 by Elastic. License: Dual-licensed Server Side Public License (SSPL) or the Elastic License
LanceDB
LanceDB is an open-source vector database that's designed to store, manage, query and retrieve embeddings on multi-modal data. It also provides a SaaS solution called LanceDB Cloud that runs serverless in the cloud.
Apache 2.0
