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Faiss vs Qdrant comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Qdrant
Ranking in Open Source Databases
5th
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
AI Data Analysis (6th)
 

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 Qdrant is 4.3%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qdrant4.3%
Faiss2.9%
Other92.8%
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.
Pawel Cislo - PeerSpot reviewer
MLOps Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Adaptive assistant has delivered faster grounded answers and has reduced token costs significantly
The main limitations I notice come down to developer experience and native features rather than performance. Building hybrid retrieval and fusion pipelines still requires considerable manual orchestration and code. Having more built-in multi-query fusion strategies natively inside Qdrant would be a significant time-saver. Additionally, managing dynamic metadata schemas and tracking index build progress during bulk ingest could be more transparent in the web UI. To make things easier for developers, Qdrant could provide more native tools for managing payload schema evolution over time. As metadata needs change in production RAG systems, updating existing payloads across large collections currently requires custom migration scripts. Built-in schema versioning and simpler automated index testing during CI/CD would make running Qdrant in rapidly evolving production environments even smoother. I rate Qdrant 9 out of 10 because its speed, sub-15 millisecond retrieval, and single-stage payload filtering make it top-tier for production RAG pipelines. I deduct one point mainly for developer experience. Setting up multi-query fusion still requires extra boilerplate code, payload metadata schema updates require custom migration scripts, and real-time visibility into HNSW graph indexing progress during bulk ingest could be improved in the web UI.

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."
"Qdrant is a good and scalable vector database, and it is free."
"Using Qdrant's hybrid search capability has improved my search results."
"We saw a clear return on investment from Qdrant, particularly in the engineering time saved and the empowerment of team members to handle self-service tasks instead of reducing headcount."
"Qdrant has positively impacted my organization mainly by reducing usage costs for AI because in the older system, in order to get the context, we were just dumping everything into the system, which would inflate the cost of the API, whatever AI we were using, such as OpenAI or Claude."
"Qdrant has positively impacted my organization by consuming much less time than building systems through coding."
"Qdrant has positively impacted my organization by significantly improving our RAG system's latency, cost-efficiency, and accuracy."
"An accuracy boost was definitely observed from 45 to 50% using Faiss to around 85 to 95% using Qdrant, and the users are really happy as they are getting suggested really good schemes that would take a lot of time to find."
"Qdrant is one of the best vector databases out there that is also open source."
 

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."
"A lot of our work is agentic right now, and we have also segmented the content to be logical, so there's not a lot of vector search anymore."
"The main limitations I notice come down to developer experience and native features rather than performance."
"There can always be improvements needed for Qdrant, but I do not want to add anything at this time."
"Qdrant is available through a containerized Docker, but a normal deployment in Qdrant is not there, and that can actually be worked out."
"One of the key limitations is that Qdrant does not have built-in role-based access control, and while being self-hosted is a benefit, it can also be improved."
"The file system lock in Qdrant prevents the API and scripts from hitting it directly, and to surpass this limitation, I have to run Qdrant client as a service, which incurs additional costs for running it continuously, so if something about that could be done, it would be really amazing."
"The area for improvement in Qdrant is its clustering capability. While it has clustering functionality, it is not easy to set up, and not everyone can configure the clustering, so there is room for improvement in the clustering configuration."
"Architectural complexity was a key friction point, as our primary database was set in Supabase, necessitating synchronization of two separate systems for user data, permissions, and states."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
Information not available
report
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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%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise2
 

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 Qdrant?
I find Qdrant's pricing and licensing extremely straightforward and cost-effective. The core product is open source under Apache 2.0, so initial experimentation and local integration testing cost n...
What needs improvement with Qdrant?
Qdrant is available through a containerized Docker, but a normal deployment in Qdrant is not there, and that can actually be worked out. That was one aspect I thought about, because I need to have ...
What is your primary use case for Qdrant?
We have a full-fledged RAG system using Qdrant Vector Database, and that is how it has benefited us. For example, we have implemented a techno-commercial evaluator using that, and it is in producti...
 

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. Airbnb 2. Amazon 3. Apple 4. BMW 5.Cisco 6. CocaCola 7. Dell 8. Disney 9. Google 10. HP 11. IBM 12. Intel 13. JPMorgan Chase 14. Kraft Heinz 15. L'Oreal 16. McDonalds 17. Merck 18. Microsoft 19. Nike20. Oracle 21. PG 22. PepsiCo 23. Procter and Gamble 24. Samsung 25. Shell 26. Sony 27. Toyota 28. Visa 29. Walmart 30. WeWork
Find out what your peers are saying about Faiss vs. Qdrant and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.