Choose Vector if you care about…
…paying proportional to your hot data, not your full dataset. Cold vectors sit on S3 at ~$0.02/GB-month, and compute is sized for what’s actually being queried. In our benchmarks, one $346/mo node serves 100M vectors. If most of your vectors are cold most of the time (per-tenant and per-user indexes are the classic case), the difference is hundreds versus thousands of dollars per month. …a durable deployment that’s one process and a bucket. Every byte of data and metadata lives in an object store bucket, so there is no replication to manage and you can kill every compute node without losing anything. There are no supporting services to run: scaling reads means adding stateless replica pods that don’t communicate with the writer or each other. …an online database. Concurrent clients upsert and query a single incrementally maintained index, rather than a serving layer you assemble yourself around a file format. …owning your search infrastructure. MIT licensed, running in your bucket and your VPC. There is no per-query pricing, data doesn’t leave your account, and no vendor can reprice or discontinue the software.How the alternatives stack up
✓ = yes · ~ = partially · ✗ = no| You care about… | Vector | turbopuffer | Pinecone | Qdrant / Weaviate | Milvus | Chroma (distributed) | LanceDB (OSS) | pgvector |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost proportional to hot data | ✓ | ✓ | ~ ¹ | ✗ | ~ ² | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Durable deployment: one process + a bucket | ✓ | managed | managed | ✗ | ~ ² | ~ ³ | ~ ⁴ | ✗ |
| Online database, consistent writes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ ⁴ | ✓ |
| License | MIT | Proprietary | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 / BSD ⁵ | Apache 2.0 ² | Apache 2.0 ³ | Apache 2.0 | PostgreSQL ⁵ |
² Milvus distributed uses object storage for durability but manages stateful shard assignment and etcd and a WAL/messaging layer. It’s a cluster rather than a single process.
³ Distributed Chroma is the nearest open-source system: Apache 2.0 and genuinely object-storage-backed. Operationally it’s a multi-service topology (frontends, query nodes, compactors, metadata) with collection-to-node routing, primarily offered as Chroma Cloud/BYOC. Single-node OSS Chroma is SQLite-backed rather than object-store-native.
⁴ LanceDB OSS is an embedded library over files. That works well on object storage for pipelines, but the online serving layer is its commercial cloud.
⁵ Open source, but durable state lives on replicated node disks: self-hosting means operating a stateful cluster, and cold data pays SSD prices. turbopuffer matches Vector on everything except the license. The open-source systems each lack either the stateless operations or the online database. Vector is the MIT-licensed system with both.
The tradeoffs
- Latency: warm queries run in low-single-digit to low-teens milliseconds (dataset-size dependent), cold queries up to ~1s at p90. This is fine for RAG and search, but not ideal for uniformly hot, sub-millisecond serving.
- Writes are batched: durable acks can take ~1s, or ~100ms fronted by Buffer at the cost of read-your-writes.
- No single-query hybrid search: Vector serves both ANN and BM25 full-text queries, but their scores aren’t comparable, so a query scores by one or the other. To blend semantic and keyword relevance, run both and fuse the result lists client-side.
Last reviewed July 2026. Please tell us if a claim has gone stale.