Comparison

Faiss vs Qdrant

No clear leader: Faiss (57.0) and Qdrant (55.8) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.

Machine formatsMarkdownJSONGraphQLMarkdown is open. JSON and GraphQL need a free key.
Faiss57
Qdrant56
Score
vioscaleAI score
Faiss57 / 100low · 35%
Qdrant56 / 100medium · 65%
Pricing
Free tier
Faiss–
Qdrant✓
Model
Price level
Faissfree
Qdrantlow
Transparent
Faiss–
Qdrant✓
Integrations
Count
Faiss–
Qdrant4
Reliability
Status page
Faiss✓
Qdrant–
Adoption
Dependent repos
Faiss5,592
Qdrant0
Github stars
Faiss41,146
Qdrant35,060
Activity
Commits last 30d
Faiss66
Qdrant100
Release
Cadence days
Faiss83
Qdrant18
History
Qdrant20 items
License
Spdx
FaissMIT
Language
Primary
FaissC++
QdrantRust
Market
Availability
Faiss–
Content
Faq
Faiss5 items
Qdrant7 items

Capabilities

Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for vector databases. “-” means undocumented, not absent.

Deployment
Deployment
FaissSelf-hosted
QdrantSelf-hosted
Serverless / consumption pricing
Faiss✗
Qdrant-
Index
ANN index (HNSW / IVF / DiskANN / ScaNN / flat)
FaissHNSW, IVF, PQ, multi-index, NSG
QdrantHNSW
Distance metrics (cosine / dot / Euclidean)
FaissEuclidean (L2), inner product, L1, Linf
Qdrantdot product
Query
Metadata filtering
Faiss-
Qdrant-
Hybrid search (dense + sparse fusion)
Faiss-
Qdrant✓
Built-in BM25 / lexical
Faiss-
Qdrant✓
Storage
Quantization
FaissProduct
QdrantScalar
On-disk vs in-memory
FaissDisk-backed
QdrantDisk-backed
Scale
Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants)
Faiss-
Qdrant✓
Horizontal scale
FaissSingle-node
QdrantSharded / distributed
Consistency
Consistency
Faiss-
Qdrant-
Licensing
Licence class
FaissPermissive OSS
QdrantSource-available
Classification
Purpose-built vs feature-of-parent
FaissExtension
QdrantDedicated DBMS

What each one is

The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.

Faiss

Faiss is a library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors. It contains algorithms that search in sets of vectors of any size, up to ones that possibly do not fit in RAM.

Independently observed

Qdrant

A database system designed for storing and searching vectors with comprehensive filtering capabilities. It provides production-ready APIs and tools for semantic similarity matching and embedding-based applications.

Independently observed

Pricing

List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.

Faiss

Open source
as of verify ↗

Qdrant

Usage-basedFree tier

Usage-based pricing billed monthly based on CPU, memory, and disk storage consumption. Free tier available.

as of verify ↗

Platform & deployment

Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.

Platforms
Web
Faiss✗
Qdrant✓
macOS
Faiss✓
Qdrant✗
Windows
Faiss✓
Qdrant✗
Linux
Faiss✓
Qdrant✗
Deployment
Cloud / SaaS
Faiss✗
Qdrant✓
Self-hosted
Faiss✓
Qdrant✓
On-premise
Faiss✗
Qdrant✓

Integrations

What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.

Faiss

Not documented yet.

Qdrant

14 total
  • Slack
  • Adobe
  • Hubspot
  • Arize
  • Google DeepMind
  • Qualcomm
  • Cohere
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Azure
  • LangChain
  • FastEmbed
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • Azure Blob Storage
Independently observed
Still deciding?

Faiss or Qdrant: which one depends on you

A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.

Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works

Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.