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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
12th
Ranking in Vector Databases
15th
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 October 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Faiss is 2.9%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 11.8%, down from 16.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL11.8%
Faiss2.9%
Other85.3%
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."
"This is an open-source product with advanced features that support OLTP/OLAP applications with the following benefits that helps organizations grow: No recurring licensing cost, huge cost savings forever, no vendor lock in, one-time migration cost, yearly major releases, increase in profit margins, completely open source, community-based FREE support available, and commercial support option."
"It is, also in our experience, the best open source GIS enabled database, with good support from other open-source tools."
"Postgres has some functions called JSONB aggregators or other aggregators, which are quite useful."
"Overall, the solution is very good. The solution is free to use. It is easy to use and quite stable."
"The product is free, which is a huge benefit."
"The solution provides complete support in terms of the SQL dialect and behaves nicely when it comes to transactions."
"Besides the simple fact of being an open product that can be used at virtually no cost, the quality of the code base is extremely good."
"Out of all the open source database applications available, PostgreSQL is among the best DB storage engines with a single unified database server unlike MySQL which supports multiple storage engines for storing the data."
 

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."
"Slow count. As the number of rows exceed a couple million, the count query and queries which get to the depth of the data (like FTS) start taking too much time even with all the right indexes in place."
"There is no tech support, however there is a lot of information available in forums or sites like serverfault.com."
"We don't have any use cases where we would use it in a large application as we do with Oracle."
"I believe that drivers must be better."
"That said, there is a learning curve when it comes to server configuration."
"They should make PostgreSQL more secure."
"You can't do that with PostgreSQL. It has more of a learning curve."
"There are some products out there that have a slightly different method of implementation for the SQL language. Some of those are slightly better in some areas, and PostgreSQL is slightly better in some areas."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
"There is an annual license."
"It is an open-source platform."
"It could be much cheaper. If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift. If you want other databases, you can add them, but PostgreSQL is the basis of everything. It's a question of money, that's it."
"This solution can offer a cheaper choice for customers since it is open-source."
"We use the open-source version of PostgreSQL and not the enterprise edition."
"It is free. In terms of operating costs, it basically needs the same platform on which Oracle runs."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"The licensing model is good."
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Top Industries

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

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Faiss vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
919,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.