Comparisons
LanceDB vs OpenSearch

LanceDB vs. OpenSearch

Compare LanceDB vs. OpenSearch 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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LanceDB vs. OpenSearch on Scalability

LanceDBOpenSearch

Separation of storage and compute

Yes.

❌

Separation of query and insertions

❌

Yes.

Multi-replication

❌

Dynamic segment placement vs. static data sharding

No (static data sharding coming soon)

Both

Cloud-native

❌

Billion-scale vector support

❌

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).

OpenSearch

OpenSearch supports horizontal scaling, cluster management optimizations, and efficient shard allocation, making it suitable for handling large datasets and high query loads effectively.

LanceDB vs. OpenSearch on Functionality

LanceDBOpenSearch

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

❌

Disk Index support

❌

Hybrid Search (ie Scalar filtering)

Yes, vector search & keyword search

yes, vector search & keyword search & scalar filtered search

Partitions/namespaces/logical groups

❌

Index type supported

IVF-PQ, HNSW

(LanceDB adopts a disk-based indexing philosophy.)

ANN

Multiple in-memory indexes support

❌

OpenSearch

OpenSearch supports:

Vectors with up to 16,000 dimensions.
Vector generation through external libraries or directly within OpenSearch.
Both binary and dense vectors.
Cosine Similarity, Inner Product, and L2 Distance (Euclidean).
Integration with multiple engines, including NMSLIB, Faiss, and Lucene, to facilitate vector indexing and searching.

LanceDB vs. OpenSearch on Purpose-built

LanceDBOpenSearch

Purpose-built for Vectors

❌

No. Vector search is an add-on to OpenSearch.

Tunable consistency

❌

Support for both stream and batch of vector data

❌

Binary Vector support

❌

Multi-language SDK

Python, Javascript/Typescript, and Rust

Java, Python, JavaScript, Go, and .Net

Database rollback

✔️

❌

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

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

OpenSearch

OpenSearch is an open-source software suite for search, analytics, security monitoring, and observability applications. It is not purpose-built for vector storage and search workloads but introduces a vector search plugin to provide this capability. Amazon OpenSearch Service is an AWS-managed service for OpenSearch.

Apache 2.0