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PostgreSQL vs Vespa comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
2nd
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
128
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Vespa
Ranking in Open Source Databases
18th
Ranking in Vector Databases
18th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of PostgreSQL is 12.6%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vespa is 1.6%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL12.6%
Vespa1.6%
Other85.8%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Shobhit Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.
Ganaraj Amakrishna - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Architect at Zoro UK
Vector search has improved e‑commerce relevance but setup and learning curve still need work
Vespa definitely had its own set of challenges. It was really hard to get into initially, especially when I started implementing it in 2024 along with one junior employee, and the lack of documentation made it difficult. I aimed for an implementation with ColBERT, a sparse embedding mechanism, which I believed would fit well for e-commerce. We went through iterations during A/B testing because the initial set did not work as expected, which extended the process to about one and a half years. Vespa has a considerable learning curve, making it challenging for most people to get into, and it is also expensive, which can deter startups or those with smaller budgets from using it. Community support was decent, and we turned to it for clarifications. However, substantial improvements in documentation are necessary, especially more examples for handling DSL effectively. Having a runtime testing feature would greatly facilitate quick iterations.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"PostgreSQL is an amazing product, very stable, predictable and reliable with rich set of features."
"There was an immediate return-on-investment of 100%."
"This database is highly reliable and offers excellent disaster recovery."
"PostgreSQL gives you much more flexibility because it's open source."
"PostgreSQL has taken a quantum leap over the last 20 years, and now it seriously threatens more established database vendors."
"PostgreSQL is an open source database engine that is very powerful, highly configurable, and more flexible than MySQL or MariaDB because you can create several databases with many schemas and define roles like owners, not only grants over tables or procedures."
"Open source products represent no cost to the organization and the basic features are sufficient to fulfill our needs."
"Every feature in PG is first, present, but secondly mature and just works."
"While conducting A/B testing, Vespa seemed to be performing slightly better than Elasticsearch, especially in search relevancy within live production systems, and its performance was decent."
"The best feature to me is the LTR feature, the ranking feature to be specific."
"Vespa is very good and it improves our product, and we got more clients."
 

Cons

"The database and applications can become very slow."
"I would like to have better support for real-time applications."
"There are some products out there that have a slightly different method of implementation for the SQL language. Some of those are slightly better in some areas, and PostgreSQL is slightly better in some areas. I would probably like to match all of those products together. It is just down to the functionality. For example, Oracle has a number of options within SQL that are outside of what you would class as the SQL standard. PostgreSQL misses some of those, but PostgreSQL does other things that are better than what Oracle does. I would like to merge those two products so that there is a certain amount of functionality in a single product."
"Logical replication would be a major improvement and it's already being worked on."
"There are many places that it could be improved through the provision of more plug-ins and extensions, such as data distribution, load balancing, new data types, indexing and searching, etc."
"PostgreSQL doesn't have a feature for temporal SQL, which is useful for gathering versions of data. This feature should be included in PostgreSQL. This feature is available in MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle Database, and DB2."
"It could be more secure."
"Instead of the installation agent downloading all the packages for the install, it should allow the user to download the packages separately on their own to do the install."
"Vespa has a considerable learning curve, making it challenging for most people to get into, and it is also expensive, which can deter startups or those with smaller budgets from using it."
"The integration is actually a pain."
"We want Vespa to implement some UI features so that we can visualize how our data goes and what embeddings it stores."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution requires a license."
"Affordable solution."
"There is an annual license."
"The community version of Postgre is basically free."
"PostgreSQL is open-source, so if capable admins are available then the setup cost can be $0."
"It is also open-source so it is free."
"We are using the free version of PostgreSQL."
"It is open-source. If you use it on-premise, it is free. It also has enterprise or commercial versions. If you go for the cloud version, there will be a cost, but it is lower than Oracle or Microsoft."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Wholesaler/Distributor
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business58
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise49
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
I am not directly involved in the licensing or procurement decisions, so I cannot comment in detail on the price. From an engineering perspective, PostgreSQL is cost-efficient because it is open so...
What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?
While improving reliability, I have noticed that the limitations in PostgreSQL can be complex. For large-scale deployments, configuration, performance tuning, and related tasks can be complex and i...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vespa?
The setup cost is definitely huge, and pricing is also steep. In terms of licensing, it seems generous for those who do not want to engage with Vespa's hosted services.
What needs improvement with Vespa?
Vespa definitely had its own set of challenges. It was really hard to get into initially, especially when I started implementing it in 2024 along with one junior employee, and the lack of documenta...
What is your primary use case for Vespa?
My main use case for Vespa is implementing it as the back-end search engine for an e-commerce site, where we have about six million products, or six million SKUs, that we are selling. I implemented...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about PostgreSQL vs. Vespa and other solutions. Updated: July 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.