# pgvectorscale

7 Hacker News commenters recommended pgvectorscale and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend this free, open-source Postgres extension for performance and scale beyond pgvector, but it is not available on RDS.

## What people warn about

- Not available on RDS (3 comments): "pgvectorscale is not available in RDS so this wasnt a great solution for us" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804391)) "it looks like a good solution, but it's not available on RDS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800435)) "the main issue with pgvectorscale is that it's not available in RDS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435858))
- Recall can be unpredictable or degrade (2 comments): "portions of the graph could become unreachable, causing recall to degrade" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50087986)) "We weren't happy with the unpredictable recall performance of pgvectorscale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090761))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [pgvector](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgvector.md): 55 recommend
- [PostGIS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgis.md): 20 recommend
- [pg_lake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-lake.md): 18 recommend
- [ParadeDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paradedb.md): 13 recommend
- [pg_textsearch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-textsearch.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "pgvectorscale", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgvectorscale/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).