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PostgreSQL vs Vespa 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

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
Vespa
Ranking in Open Source Databases
18th
Ranking in Vector Databases
18th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of PostgreSQL is 11.5%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vespa is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL11.5%
Vespa1.7%
Other86.8%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Ganaraj Amakrishna - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Architect at Zoro UK
Vector search has improved e‑commerce relevance but setup and learning curve still need work
Vespa definitely had its own set of challenges. It was really hard to get into initially, especially when I started implementing it in 2024 along with one junior employee, and the lack of documentation made it difficult. I aimed for an implementation with ColBERT, a sparse embedding mechanism, which I believed would fit well for e-commerce. We went through iterations during A/B testing because the initial set did not work as expected, which extended the process to about one and a half years. Vespa has a considerable learning curve, making it challenging for most people to get into, and it is also expensive, which can deter startups or those with smaller budgets from using it. Community support was decent, and we turned to it for clarifications. However, substantial improvements in documentation are necessary, especially more examples for handling DSL effectively. Having a runtime testing feature would greatly facilitate quick iterations.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The new JSON data type that allows to use some NoSQL-like functionality is great because it brings some of the most valuable features of NoSQL databases to relational databases."
"It is a pretty comprehensive database system. Its performance is good, and it does what it is supposed to do. It also integrates very well."
"The performance is good."
"We use this solution for the interface between our property management system and the cloud-based system."
"It is very useful for both structured and unstructured data. You can store unstructured and structured data in PostgreSQL. It is easy to use. You can easily manage things through PostgreSQL Admin. It is cost-effective. Its on-premise version is free. It is agnostic of on-premise or cloud. You can install it on the cloud or on-premises. It is available with all clouds, and you can also install it on desktop or Windows Servers."
"We use the solution to store tables. It is stable and performs well."
"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."
"PostgreSQL has been very stable in my experience, handling concurrent requests reliably while maintaining data consistency with ACID transactions and accommodating concurrent users with strong data integrity, making it mature and widely used in production systems."
"While conducting A/B testing, Vespa seemed to be performing slightly better than Elasticsearch, especially in search relevancy within live production systems, and its performance was decent."
"The best feature to me is the LTR feature, the ranking feature to be specific."
"Vespa is very good and it improves our product, and we got more clients."
 

Cons

"The stability was an issue, because when coding under Eclipse with Java, some errors occurred while trying to connect to the database, so troubleshooting may be difficult, since you don't know if it's a Java coding issue or a PostgreSQL translation issue."
"There is no tech support, however there is a lot of information available in forums or sites like serverfault.com."
"A better export facility which is GUI friendly would be an improvement."
"It would be good to have machine learning functionality in this solution, similar to Microsoft SQL Server and other solutions. Machine learning capability for a basic level or a common user would be useful. It can also have good reporting capabilities."
"There could be a plugin to distribute the data on servers for the product."
"String manipulation functions can be improved."
"I would love to have primary keys on views. This function missing has made PostgreSQL harder than need be with Microsoft Access as a front end."
"I find, sometimes, that it is too restrictive in cross-table/view constraints."
"The integration is actually a pain."
"Vespa has a considerable learning curve, making it challenging for most people to get into, and it is also expensive, which can deter startups or those with smaller budgets from using it."
"We want Vespa to implement some UI features so that we can visualize how our data goes and what embeddings it stores."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model is good."
"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."
"It is also open-source so it is free."
"We use the open-source version of PostgreSQL and not the enterprise edition."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"The community version of Postgre is basically free."
"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."
"It is an open-source platform."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Wholesaler/Distributor
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise49
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vespa?
The setup cost is definitely huge, and pricing is also steep. In terms of licensing, it seems generous for those who do not want to engage with Vespa's hosted services.
What needs improvement with Vespa?
Vespa definitely had its own set of challenges. It was really hard to get into initially, especially when I started implementing it in 2024 along with one junior employee, and the lack of documenta...
What is your primary use case for Vespa?
My main use case for Vespa is implementing it as the back-end search engine for an e-commerce site, where we have about six million products, or six million SKUs, that we are selling. I implemented...
 

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Find out what your peers are saying about PostgreSQL vs. Vespa and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.