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Faiss vs PostgreSQL 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
13th
Ranking in Vector Databases
13th
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
2nd
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 August 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Faiss is 3.0%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 12.6%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL12.6%
Faiss3.0%
Other84.4%
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."
"The built-in code procedural language is the most valuable. It has a built-in layer for code procedures. Its installation is very easy and quick, and it is free. It is also stable, and its performance is also good."
"The solution is scalable, it is very good."
"It is easy to use."
"It's a useful solution, that can be widely used."
"PostgreSQL has complete SQL dialects and is useful for writing sophisticated and complex queries. We have experience with Oracle database. My partner is experienced in DDA and he writes sophisticated SQL queries. The solution helps to get the job done in the best possible way. In today’s age, most developers do not have strong SQL knowledge or language command. They find it difficult to write even a SQL statement. These developers write cool queries which perform badly on the database end. As DBAs, we constantly urge the developers not to write bad queries, help them learn more, and write placebo commands."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"It has completely met our needs. It works, and it is robust."
"It's very stable."
 

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 would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
"It could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
"If it was free to use, it would be the perfect solution."
"We often find the solution's datetime datatype challenging."
"JSON support although great, it still has some gotchas, querying and manipulating JSON will be one of the topics I'd like to see some improvement, still feels not natural to work with it."
"PostgreSQL uses high memory compared to its counterparts when a highly demanding load is involved, especially one that makes many concurrent connections to the database."
"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."
"The interface climate could be better."
"PostgreSQL could improve by adding data warehousing tools."
"The only feature where I can see an area of improvement is with the partitioning."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an open-source tool."
"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."
"The community version of Postgre is basically free."
"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."
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
"We use the open-source version of PostgreSQL and not the enterprise edition."
"The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software 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: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.