No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Faiss vs PostgreSQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Faiss
Ranking in Open Source Databases
12th
Ranking in Vector Databases
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
1st
Ranking in Vector Databases
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
127
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Faiss is 3.7%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 13.5%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL13.5%
Faiss3.7%
Other82.8%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Kalindu Sekarage - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer
Integration improves accuracy and supports token-level embedding
The best features FAISS offers for my team include seamless integration with Colbert and the ability to use FAISS via the Ragatouille framework, which is tailor-made for using the Colbert model. Feature-wise, FAISS allows for more accurate result retrieval, and retrieval speed is also good when comparing the index size. Regarding features, I also emphasize that the usability of FAISS is very seamless, particularly its integration with Colbert and Ragatouille. FAISS has positively impacted my organization by helping us increase the accuracy of retrieval documents; when we store documents in token-level embedding, the accuracy will be high. Additionally, we do not need any external server to host FAISS, allowing us to integrate it with our backend framework, making it a very flexible framework.
Shobhit Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
"I used Faiss as a basic database."
"The solution is quite a good database for light applications for sure."
"I would say that the combination of PostgreSQL's features, plus the reliability and performance it offers in combination with the fact that you don't pay for a license was the reason I chose it."
"The solution is quite stable."
"It's quite scalable."
"PostgreSQL is the only open source and multi-functional database solution out in the market today."
"PostgreSQL's feature set was excellent for our needs, and we didn't want an expensive (meaning hardware utilization) RDBMS."
"PostgreSQL allows us to have a single database engine used for OLTP and OLAP workloads, for relational and non-relational data."
"Overall, I have only praise for the solution."
 

Cons

"It could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
"One of the drawbacks of Faiss is that it works only in-memory. If it could provide separate persistent storage without relying on in-memory, it would reduce the overhead."
"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
"There is room to improve some user friendly properties such as input and output tools, some people may find interesting to implement MERGE as a SQL command."
"PostgreSQL is a stable system, but from a security point of view, it still needs improvement."
"We had once a problem with a script that created a huge SQL statement with about 40,000 function calls."
"I would like to have better support for real-time applications."
"I'd like to see better memory management. I think that that's one of the few areas that Postgres does not handle as well as MySQL does or did."
"PostgreSQL doesn't have a feature for temporal SQL, which is useful for gathering versions of data. This feature should be included in PostgreSQL. This feature is available in MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle Database, and DB2."
"It could be improved by using parallelization. We want distributed computing."
"They should make PostgreSQL more secure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
"We do not pay for licensing."
"It is free. In terms of operating costs, it basically needs the same platform on which Oracle runs."
"It is also open-source so it is free."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Open Source Databases solutions are best for your needs.
886,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise47
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Faiss?
I used Faiss as a basic database.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Faiss?
I did not purchase FAISS through the AWS Marketplace because FAISS is an open-source product. My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is straightforward, as there is no cost for acqui...
What needs improvement with Faiss?
I currently do not think there is anything to be improved based on our experience, as Faiss performs as we expected for our workflow. I would like to see improvement in the fact that FAISS currentl...
How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Facebook 2. Airbnb 3. Pinterest 4. Twitter 5. Microsoft 6. Uber 7. LinkedIn 8. Netflix 9. Spotify 10. Adobe 11. eBay 12. Dropbox 13. Yelp 14. Salesforce 15. IBM 16. Intel 17. Nvidia 18. Qualcomm 19. Samsung 20. Sony 21. Tencent 22. Alibaba 23. Baidu 24. JD.com 25. Rakuten 26. Zillow 27. Booking.com 28. Expedia 29. TripAdvisor 30. Rakuten 31. Rakuten Viber 32. Rakuten Ichiba
1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg
Find out what your peers are saying about Faiss vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.