# zvec

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

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a fast, lightweight embedded vector database that runs in-process and is simple to use. The most common caveat is that speed depends on local disk performance.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast in benchmarks (6 comments): "Its benchmark numbers are quite strong, and recent versions also support full-text + hybrid retrieval and DiskANN." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681548)) "we're seeing double their throughput—so it's far from trivial on that playing field" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023815)) "doubling their throughput at 8K QPS is meaningful in that specific setting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023941))
- Simple in-process, cheaper than services (2 comments): "precomputing embeddings and storing them and running on a small vector search like this somewhere is much simpler/cheaper than running external services" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021297)) "The in-process model is really nice when you want to layer it in with your own filtering and ranking" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46989678))

## What people warn about

- Speed depends on local disk (1 comments): "the gotcha is that the reason zvec is fast is because it is primarily constrained by local disk performance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128891))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

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

## Cite as

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