VectorChord
PostgreSQL extension for disk-friendly billion-scale vector search using RaBitQ quantization.
About
Postgres can hold a billion vectors with VectorChord, TensorChord's extension for scalable vector search and the designated successor to pgvecto.rs. Its index pairs clustering with RaBitQ quantization, trading full-precision storage for compact bit representations that make search disk-friendly: the project reports indexing 100 million 768-dimension vectors in about 20 minutes, serving that scale from a 247 dollar per month AWS i4i.xlarge instance, and fitting 6x more vectors per dollar than Pinecone, with native 4-bit and 8-bit vector types available. Queries stay inside PostgreSQL, so filtering, joins, and transactions combine with similarity search in ordinary SQL. Deployment is easiest through the prebuilt Docker images at ghcr.io/tensorchord/vchord-postgres, with the current release at v1.1.1 and documentation at docs.vectorchord.ai. The code is dual licensed under AGPL-3.0 and the Elastic License 2.0. Around 1,800 GitHub stars and steady adoption among teams scaling past pgvector's comfort zone make it one of the notable Postgres vector options.
Should you use VectorChord?
Pick it when
Pick VectorChord when a Postgres-centric team must scale vector search toward hundreds of millions of embeddings on disk with RaBitQ quantization, keeping SQL filters, joins, and transactions, and AGPL or Elastic terms are acceptable.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if AGPL-3.0 or Elastic-2.0 conflicts with your distribution or SaaS plans, or your managed Postgres will not load it: pgvectorscale uses the permissive PostgreSQL license, and plain pgvector suffices at low millions.
Alternatives to VectorChord
- pgvectorscale
Disk-based StreamingDiskANN for pgvector under the permissive PostgreSQL license, with label-filtered search and a managed option on Timescale Cloud.
- pgvector
Permissive license and bundled on RDS, Supabase, and Neon; HNSW and IVFFlat get memory-hungry as you grow, but nothing extra to install.
- Milvus
A dedicated vector database built for distributed scale under Apache-2.0; you leave Postgres, but avoid AGPL and Elastic License terms.
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Details
- Category
- Vector Databases & Embeddings
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- AGPL-3.0 OR Elastic-2.0
- Added
- Jul 29, 2026