sqlite-vec
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 2 of 10 vector databases by recommenders
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.
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.
20 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 17
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 85%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 17 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 5.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fast, simple vector search
“have seen very fast lookups with pgvector (HNSW index) and sqlite-vec on 20k vectors”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “Tuning Semantic Search on Jfmm.net” “sqlite-vec is a great vector index”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Sub-Millisecond RAG on Apple Silicon. No Server. No API. One File” “it's a great performance addition”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: How This Graybeard Built the Fastest and Freest Postgres BM25 Search” Keeps stack simple with SQLite
“SQLite + sqlite-vec + Tantivy + a tiny embedding model will stay as my go to.”
Comment from 8 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: Rowboat – Open-source, local-first alternative to Claude Desktop” “SQLite + sqlite-vec keeping things simple is underrated.”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: [Jack The Butler] Open-source, self-hosted AI chatbot for hotels” Useful long-term memory for agents
“Along with the commit history, the vec-db gives the agent long-term memory.”
Comment from 31 Aug 2026 in “Agent memory as a file format” “sqlite_vec is already the sqlite for AI memory”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Sub-Millisecond RAG on Apple Silicon. No Server. No API. One File” Good results in practice
“I've been getting some good results from sqlite-vec on my current project”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite” “I used sqlite-vec, and was very happy with it.”
Comment from 28 Nov 2025 in “So you wanna build a local RAG?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Brute-force search, latency scales linearly
“sqlite-vec is great for smaller dimensionality or smaller cardinality datasets, but know that it's brute-force”
Comment from 15 Feb 2026 in “zvec: embedded vector database” “its latency does scale linearly with dataset size”
Comment from 16 Feb 2026 in “zvec: embedded vector database”
Other vector databases people recommend
The four most recommended other vector databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qdrant | 22 | 3 | 88% | 10 | — | Approved |
| sqlite-vecThis page | 17 | 3 | 85% | 7 | — | Approved |
| Chroma | 17 | 5 | 77% | 7 | — | Approved |
| turbopuffer | 13 | 2 | 87% | 8 | — | Approved |
| LanceDB | 12 | 2 | 86% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
16 of the 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Along with the commit history, the vec-db gives the agent long-term memory.”
“SQLite + sqlite-vec + Tantivy + a tiny embedding model will stay as my go to.”
“last we checked it hadn’t implemented HNSW/had good support for running vector search in-browser yet”
“sqlite-vector which is better than sqlite-vec”
“it's a great performance addition”
“sqlite-vec for vector search”
“sqlite-vec is a great vector index”
“sqlite_vec is already the sqlite for AI memory”
“I've actually added basic zvec tests to my fork of sqlite-vec”
“its latency does scale linearly with dataset size”
“SQLite + sqlite-vec keeping things simple is underrated.”
“sqlite-vec is great for smaller dimensionality or smaller cardinality datasets, but know that it's brute-force”
“have seen very fast lookups with pgvector (HNSW index) and sqlite-vec on 20k vectors”
“I've been getting some good results from sqlite-vec on my current project”
“plenty of good add-ons for it such as sqlite-vec for storing vectors”
“I used sqlite-vec, and was very happy with it.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.