# Vespa

7 Hacker News commenters recommended Vespa and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open-source search engine for hybrid vector and filtered queries, with one user reporting 40ms p99 query times on a 1.4B-vector deployment. Critics say it is more complex than it should be.

## Why people recommend it

- Hybrid vector search with filtering (2 comments): "Hybrid search with vector similarity and filtering I think has mostly been solved by Vespa" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45892107)) "Vespa supports filtering across parent-child relationships (like a relational database)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45805087))

## What people warn about

- Everything more complex than needed (1 comments): "rest of Yahoo had great code (like vespa or the graph behind Yahoo 360), but everything was more complex than it should be" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907124))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Elasticsearch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/elasticsearch.md): 68 recommend
- [Antfly](https://hackerapproved.com/p/antfly.md): 15 recommend
- [Scry](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scry.md): 11 recommend
- [Typesense](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typesense.md): 8 recommend
- [Manticore Search](https://hackerapproved.com/p/manticore-search.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

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