Was about to use Weaviate for a project today and this gives me pause. Anyone have some strong opinions? pg_vector also been on my radar recently. Qdrant vs Weaviate I know is partially a rust vs go topic.
As another signal, check out this report by Streamlit, which shows the popularity of different vector databases among Streamlit apps: https://state-of-llm.streamlit.app/#third
Faiss and Pinecone are at the top (disclosure: I'm from Pinecone). But Faiss isn't really a full-fledged vector DB. Pinecone is a managed option which is out of the question for a company like Twitter and maybe for you (although you should consider it). After that comes Chroma in third, and then Qdrant, and then Weaviate.
Chroma has a big following by virtue of being plugged into the AI ecosystem in SF. Qdrant seems to be doing great work but their location in Europe is probably not helping.
Regarding your last sentence: the European HQ might not exactly help for non-EU customers, but much much more so for actual EU customers (which is a multi billion Dollar market by itself). Sensitive EU companies would not use Pinecone, even if they wanted to.
The local API mode is very nice feature over others. Having an almost sqlite3 style local db that then works the same in server mode is a very good feature.
I will be trying it instead of Weaviate this week. I’m also slightly confused about embedding vector generation vs other db who have that built in. Just need to read more I guess
Interestingly the effect of location is also visible when you compare LMQL and Guidance for constrained generation. LMQL seems to be a great option but has received much less attention compared to Guidance, maybe partly due to the fact that it comes from Europe not the US.
Disagree on location as a determining factor for great technology. You’re citing stats around market adoption because of marketing - not quality of the technology.
If Twitter chose to use Qdrant for Grok, it doesn’t matter that Qdrant is out of Berlin.
What matters is that Qdrant is the most performant, and it’s an open-source vectordb, not a closed-source vectordb like Pinecone.
We've been using qdrant in production for over a year. It's excellent and the team are very responsive to the few issues we've had. Qdrant does one job and scales well.
(disclosure: I work at Weaviate)
I think it depends on your use-case. From what I've seen, Weaviate and Qdrant have similar offerings in terms of features, open-sourceness, flexible deployment, and integrations with other services. Weaviate does provide certain things easier to set up, like built-in hybrid search, modules for integrations, vectorization, etc. (so it's just a one-line config change), and it's all custom-built from the ground up. But Qdrant gets a lot of support from the Rust community and has a slightly more flexible free cloud tier.
Also, don't believe everything posted on the internet ;)
I've been using pgvector, it has worked as expected, which is all I want. Personally my choice was based entirely on the fact that I already use postgres, and that it will still probably exist in it's current form after the dust settles on the vector db market.
Does Qdrant look like a winning horse then?
Was about to use Weaviate for a project today and this gives me pause. Anyone have some strong opinions? pg_vector also been on my radar recently. Qdrant vs Weaviate I know is partially a rust vs go topic.