Comparisons
FAISS vs LanceDB

FAISS vs. LanceDB

Compare FAISS vs. LanceDB by the following set of capabilities. We want you to choose the best database for you, even if it’s not us.

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FAISS vs. LanceDB on Scalability

FAISSLanceDB

Separation of storage and compute

❌

Yes.

Separation of query and insertions

No. Can not scale beyond single node.

❌

Multi-replication

❌

Dynamic segment placement vs. static data sharding

No distributed data replacement

No (static data sharding coming soon)

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

FAISS scalability

Without any distributed data replacement, FAISS is not able to scale beyond a single node

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).

FAISS 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.

FAISSLanceDB

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

❌

Yes, vector search & keyword search

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

FLAT, IVS_FLAT, IVF_SQ8, IVF_PQ, HNSW, BIN_FLAT and BIN_IVF_FLAT

IVF-PQ, HNSW

(LanceDB adopts a disk-based indexing philosophy.)

Multiple in-memory indexes support

❌

FAISS functionality

FAISS is an algorithm to support kNN search.

FAISS 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

FAISSLanceDB

Purpose-built for Vectors

✔️

❌

Tunable consistency

❌

Support for both stream and batch of vector data

❌

Binary Vector support

❌

Multi-language SDK

Python, JavaScript

Python, Javascript/Typescript, and Rust

Database rollback

❌

✔️

FAISS vs. LanceDB: what’s right for me?

FAISS

Faiss is a powerful library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors, with GPU-accelerated algorithms and Python wrappers, developed at FAIR, the fundamental AI research team at Meta License: MIT 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