No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Faiss vs MariaDB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Faiss
Ranking in Open Source Databases
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (13th)
MariaDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Faiss is 3.0%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 5.6%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MariaDB5.6%
Faiss3.0%
Other91.4%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Kalindu Sekarage - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer
Integration improves accuracy and supports token-level embedding
The best features FAISS offers for my team include seamless integration with Colbert and the ability to use FAISS via the Ragatouille framework, which is tailor-made for using the Colbert model. Feature-wise, FAISS allows for more accurate result retrieval, and retrieval speed is also good when comparing the index size. Regarding features, I also emphasize that the usability of FAISS is very seamless, particularly its integration with Colbert and Ragatouille. FAISS has positively impacted my organization by helping us increase the accuracy of retrieval documents; when we store documents in token-level embedding, the accuracy will be high. Additionally, we do not need any external server to host FAISS, allowing us to integrate it with our backend framework, making it a very flexible framework.
AB
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
Has supported web application data needs but requires design adjustments to manage complex queries efficiently
Complex queries in MariaDB where the query needs to parse thousands of lines or data values face some performance issues. For small and medium-size volume, it is pretty good. If it goes beyond certain data and complex queries, we see performance issues. We tried the advanced replication feature between different regions, replicating data specifically residing on MariaDB to two different regions of MariaDB data, and there were some technical snags in terms of slowness and longer processing time. Point-in-time recovery in MariaDB is good for small databases. When data volume increases beyond 5 GB or 10 GB per day or runs into double-digit GBs, we found some performance issues. For data below 10 GB, it works fine. Performance is the primary focus area for MariaDB, particularly during transactions or complex query jobs where slow performance is observed. MariaDB is scalable and easy to scale.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I used Faiss as a basic database."
"The product has better performance and stability compared to one of its competitors."
"MariaDB has positively impacted our organization in terms of reliability; it has been incredibly stable, and from an operational standpoint, it has drastically improved our deployment workflows since we can run the exact same MariaDB community version locally in Docker containers as we do on our staging and production servers."
"The most valuable features of the solution stem from the fact that it is an open-source product and offers its users great online community support."
"The solution is very scalable."
"This solution is user-friendly."
"What I like is that it's very easy to configure, and just from time to time, you can make your backups, and that's it."
"MariaDB can solve things better than MySQL, and MariaDB has better performance than MySQL."
"I haven't faced any technical issues with the product, and it works fine."
"The most valuable feature of MariaDB is the replication mode."
 

Cons

"One of the drawbacks of Faiss is that it works only in-memory. If it could provide separate persistent storage without relying on in-memory, it would reduce the overhead."
"It would be beneficial if I could set a parameter and see different query mechanisms being run."
"It could be more accessible for handling larger data sets."
"The configuration could be improved. It should be easier."
"With respect to clustering and the master-slave configuration, sometimes the slave goes out of synch."
"Replication could be better, and it's not so simple. It would be better if they had a replication server. It would make things a lot easier. You need to have that replication server, but not in the same server farm. Then there will be a bit of latency between both because you should have one in one city and another one in a different city. That kind of solution should be more baked into every single database today. Mirroring the database in a live environment where any record written on the production server replicates instantly across the fiber on the other server wasn't easy. Many people don't even bother with that, and they just run one server."
"The GUI could be improved a bit. The user interface needs to be improved."
"The stability could always continue to be improved upon."
"We'd like more data intelligence."
"The difficult part related to the product stems not from the tool itself but is related to learning how to implement the product in the right way without creating any wrong configuration that could cause security issues or performance issues."
"I would like to see more compatibility going forward. This would help if there is a need to change databases."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Faiss is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
"The cost is quite good. You can have the open source, free version, which has adequate capacity."
"The product is not expensive."
"I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price, and ten is high price since there are some support costs involved, even though it isn't an open-source solution."
"The price could be less expensive."
"My company uses the free version of the solution."
"The solution is free, but if you want the enterprise version you will need to pay for some licenses but the cost is less than other solutions, such as Oracle."
"This is an open source solution with no licensing fees."
"This is an open-source product, which can be used free of charge."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Open Source Databases solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
University
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Faiss?
I did not purchase FAISS through the AWS Marketplace because FAISS is an open-source product. My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is straightforward, as there is no cost for acqui...
What needs improvement with Faiss?
I currently do not think there is anything to be improved based on our experience, as Faiss performs as we expected for our workflow. I would like to see improvement in the fact that FAISS currentl...
What is your primary use case for Faiss?
My main use case for FAISS is in a retrieval-augmented generation project using it with OpenAI, where we use FAISS to store our embeddings created by the Colbert model and for retrieval as well. In...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?
MariaDB is in the pricey range, especially for huge databases handling terabytes of data. The cost depends on the volume of data and different features enabled during configuration, such as backup ...
What needs improvement with MariaDB?
The key area where MariaDB could be improved is its native GUI tooling; while the command-line interface works perfectly fine, the built-in visual tools for administration, management, and query de...
What is your primary use case for MariaDB?
My main use case for MariaDB was web applications, and I have been using MariaDB for just about a year now as I was in the development team. A specific web application where I used MariaDB is a hea...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Facebook 2. Airbnb 3. Pinterest 4. Twitter 5. Microsoft 6. Uber 7. LinkedIn 8. Netflix 9. Spotify 10. Adobe 11. eBay 12. Dropbox 13. Yelp 14. Salesforce 15. IBM 16. Intel 17. Nvidia 18. Qualcomm 19. Samsung 20. Sony 21. Tencent 22. Alibaba 23. Baidu 24. JD.com 25. Rakuten 26. Zillow 27. Booking.com 28. Expedia 29. TripAdvisor 30. Rakuten 31. Rakuten Viber 32. Rakuten Ichiba
Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities
Find out what your peers are saying about Faiss vs. MariaDB and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.