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Faiss vs PostgreSQL comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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
13th
Ranking in Vector Databases
14th
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
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
128
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Faiss is 2.9%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 12.0%, down from 16.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL12.0%
Faiss2.9%
Other85.1%
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

"I used Faiss as a basic database."
"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
"For its open source model and very good documentation, it is very easy to optimize queries within bigger databases (100GB), and because it is free, it lowers the price of our solution so we can address smaller customers."
"Great documentation, active community support, excellent management and development tools and availability on various platforms makes PostgreSQL a good data base management system."
"I would recommend PostgreSQL to anyone who wants to save costs and deploy a reliable enterprise class database server."
"PostgreSQL is for personal use, e.g. I've been using it for my applications."
"It is easy to install and easy to manage. There is no license on it, so it is free. There is high compatibility with Oracle, and there are many tools for the migration of data from Oracle to Postgre."
"I like to work with a piece of software that is bug free and doesn't require to be launched in order that users will find a couple of bugs in the coming weeks and that the company has to fix it."
"The solution is scalable, it is very good."
"The spatial extension, PostGIS, is amazing and probably the gold standard."
 

Cons

"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
"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 could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
"PostgreSQL’s performance could be improved."
"It should have a better native client tool to manage the databases."
"It is possible that in the newer version this has been addressed, but I would like the deployment in microservices architecture could be improved."
"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."
"The search option is not very good."
"This extension hasn’t been updated in several releases and would benefit from an overhaul."
"Logical replication would be a major improvement and it's already being worked on."
"In the next release, I would like to see better integration with other platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
"It is free, but if you need support, you can go for the commercial version called EnterpriseDB. They provide paid support, and they can even do hosting for you if you want standby and support."
"There is an annual license."
"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."
"The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
"It is open-source. If you use it on-premise, it is free. It also has enterprise or commercial versions. If you go for the cloud version, there will be a cost, but it is lower than Oracle or Microsoft."
"We do not pay for licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business58
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise49
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your primary use case for Faiss?
My main use case for FAISS is in a retrieval-augmented generation project using it with OpenAI, where we use FAISS to store our embeddings created by the Colbert model and for retrieval as well. In...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
I am not directly involved in the licensing or procurement decisions, so I cannot comment in detail on the price. From an engineering perspective, PostgreSQL is cost-efficient because it is open so...
What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?
While improving reliability, I have noticed that the limitations in PostgreSQL can be complex. For large-scale deployments, configuration, performance tuning, and related tasks can be complex and i...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

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Find out what your peers are saying about Faiss vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
912,801 professionals have used our research since 2012.