Turbopuffer vs LanceDB
Compare deployment options, cost efficiency, and features to choose the right vector database for your application.
Database Comparison
LanceDB 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 LanceDB:
- LanceDB offers more deployment options
- Turbopuffer is more cost-effective
- LanceDB has more permissive licensing
- LanceDB has 6 more strengths
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.
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).
Feature Comparison
Infrastructure & Technical Details
| Feature | Turbopuffer | LanceDB |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | BYOC, Managed Cloud | Embedded/Local, Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud (LanceDB Cloud) |
| Cost | Minimum commitment $64/month | OSS: Free; Cloud: usage-based with $100 free credits; Enterprise: custom pricing |
| License | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 |
| Index Types | SPFresh | IVF-PQ, IVF-HNSW-PQ, BTree |
| Cloud Providers | AWS, GCP, Azure | AWS, Azure, GCP, Any (self-hosted) |
| Regional Flexibility | high | high |
| Strengths | 7 | 13 |
| Weaknesses | 7 | 9 |