# sqlite-vec

17 Hacker News commenters recommended sqlite-vec and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free SQLite extension for storing and searching vectors locally, valued for simplicity and speed on small datasets. Critics note it is brute-force, so latency grows linearly with dataset size.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast, simple vector search (3 comments): "have seen very fast lookups with pgvector (HNSW index) and sqlite-vec on 20k vectors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46848428)) "sqlite-vec is a great vector index" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47052048)) "it's a great performance addition" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47593773))
- Keeps stack simple with SQLite (2 comments): "SQLite + sqlite-vec + Tantivy + a tiny embedding model will stay as my go to." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48832659)) "SQLite + sqlite-vec keeping things simple is underrated." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023821))
- Useful long-term memory for agents (2 comments): "Along with the commit history, the vec-db gives the agent long-term memory." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49513078)) "sqlite_vec is already the sqlite for AI memory" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051294))
- Good results in practice (2 comments): "I've been getting some good results from sqlite-vec on my current project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126836)) "I used sqlite-vec, and was very happy with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46082333))

## What people warn about

- Brute-force search, latency scales linearly (2 comments): "sqlite-vec is great for smaller dimensionality or smaller cardinality datasets, but know that it's brute-force" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47020859)) "its latency does scale linearly with dataset size" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031400))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Qdrant](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qdrant.md): 22 recommend
- [Chroma](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chroma.md): 17 recommend
- [LanceDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/lancedb.md): 12 recommend
- [FAISS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/faiss.md): 9 recommend
- [zvec](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zvec.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

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