Turbopuffer vs LanceDB

Compare deployment options, cost efficiency, and features to choose the right vector database for your application. If you want to compare these models on your data, try Agentset.

Database Comparison

Turbopuffer takes the lead.

Both Turbopuffer and LanceDB are powerful vector databases designed for efficient similarity search and storage. However, their deployment options and features differ in important ways.

Why Turbopuffer:

  • LanceDB offers more deployment options
  • Turbopuffer is more cost-effective
  • LanceDB has more permissive licensing
  • LanceDB has 6 more strengths

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Turbopuffer

Turbopuffer is a fully managed cloud vector database built around a centroid-optimized SPFresh index. It is designed for extremely low-cost, large-scale storage, leveraging object storage engines like S3, GCS, or Azure Blob.

Deployment: BYOC, Managed Cloud
Cost: Minimum commitment $64/month
License: Proprietary
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LanceDB

LanceDB is an open-source, AI-native multimodal lakehouse designed for billion-scale vector search. Built on the Lance columnar format, it combines embedded simplicity with cloud-scale performance. LanceDB's disk-based architecture with compute-storage separation enables up to 100x cost savings compared to memory-based solutions while supporting multimodal data (text, images, video, audio).

Deployment: Embedded/Local, Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud (LanceDB Cloud)
Cost: OSS: Free; Cloud: usage-based with $100 free credits; Enterprise: custom pricing
License: Apache 2.0
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Build RAG in Minutes, Not Months

Agentset gives you a complete RAG API with fully managed vector storage and retrieval. Upload your data, call the API, and get accurate results from day one.

import { Agentset } from "agentset";

const agentset = new Agentset();
const ns = agentset.namespace("ns_1234");

const results = await ns.search(
  "What is multi-head attention?"
);

for (const result of results) {
  console.log(result.text);
}

Feature Comparison

Infrastructure & Technical Details

FeatureTurbopufferLanceDB
DeploymentBYOC, Managed CloudEmbedded/Local, Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud (LanceDB Cloud)
CostMinimum commitment $64/monthOSS: Free; Cloud: usage-based with $100 free credits; Enterprise: custom pricing
LicenseProprietaryApache 2.0
Index TypesSPFreshIVF-PQ, IVF-HNSW-PQ, BTree
Cloud ProvidersAWS, GCP, AzureAWS, Azure, GCP, Any (self-hosted)
Regional Flexibilityhighhigh
Strengths713
Weaknesses79