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Faiss vs MariaDB comparison

 

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
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (13th)
MariaDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Faiss is 3.3%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 5.6%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MariaDB5.6%
Faiss3.3%
Other91.1%
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.
AB
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
Has supported web application data needs but requires design adjustments to manage complex queries efficiently
Complex queries in MariaDB where the query needs to parse thousands of lines or data values face some performance issues. For small and medium-size volume, it is pretty good. If it goes beyond certain data and complex queries, we see performance issues. We tried the advanced replication feature between different regions, replicating data specifically residing on MariaDB to two different regions of MariaDB data, and there were some technical snags in terms of slowness and longer processing time. Point-in-time recovery in MariaDB is good for small databases. When data volume increases beyond 5 GB or 10 GB per day or runs into double-digit GBs, we found some performance issues. For data below 10 GB, it works fine. Performance is the primary focus area for MariaDB, particularly during transactions or complex query jobs where slow performance is observed. MariaDB is scalable and easy to scale.

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."
"From the user's perspective, the performance of the columnar queries is very good in terms of the database when comparing it to the Oracle, and MySQL."
"Visual Studio offers unit testing integration and extensive searching capabilities."
"Installation is straightforward."
"MariaDB has positively impacted our organization in terms of reliability; it has been incredibly stable, and from an operational standpoint, it has drastically improved our deployment workflows since we can run the exact same MariaDB community version locally in Docker containers as we do on our staging and production servers."
"One of the great features of MariaDB is its scalability. It's easy to handle even with large databases."
"From a customer perspective, MariaDB is a good choice for cluster configuration. It's also easy to operate and cheap."
"I am editing."
"The technical support of MariaDB is very helpful, and they came and tuned our queries with one-to-one assistance."
 

Cons

"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."
"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
"The solution can improve by having support for more integration. However, at this time it is working well for us."
"I’m not sure if it can scale."
"When we have had issues with accidental computer shutdown or a power outage, our MariaDB database was corrupted."
"Replication could be better, and it's not so simple. It would be better if they had a replication server."
"The dashboard and pricing need improvement."
"The key area where MariaDB could be improved is its native GUI tooling; while the command-line interface works perfectly fine, the built-in visual tools for administration, management, and query design feel outdated compared to some competitors."
"The GUI could be improved a bit. The user interface needs to be improved."
"MariaDB doesn't handle long or complex SQL queries quite as well as Oracle Database."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an open-source tool."
"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The price could be less expensive."
"We use the solution's free version."
"The solution is free, but if you want the enterprise version you will need to pay for some licenses but the cost is less than other solutions, such as Oracle."
"We pay for a yearly license."
"The price of this solution represents a very good compromise between the cost and what it offers."
"I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price since there are some support costs involved, even though it isn't an open-source solution."
"The cost is quite good. You can have the open source, free version, which has adequate capacity."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise26
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?
MariaDB is in the pricey range, especially for huge databases handling terabytes of data. The cost depends on the volume of data and different features enabled during configuration, such as backup ...
What needs improvement with MariaDB?
Sometimes, complex queries that were supported in Oracle are not available in MariaDB. Advanced indexing is not available. Oracle is very advanced compared to MariaDB, and those advanced features a...
What is your primary use case for MariaDB?
My client has been using MariaDB for the last four years. We are using MariaDB in the cloud.
 

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
Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities
Find out what your peers are saying about Faiss vs. MariaDB and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.