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

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
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
127
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Vespa
Ranking in Open Source Databases
20th
Ranking in Vector Databases
20th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of PostgreSQL is 13.1%, down from 18.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vespa is 1.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL13.1%
Vespa1.7%
Other85.2%
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

"It is very scalable and comes with a bonus: no licensing issues as you scale with your databases."
"Initial setup is simple."
"It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping."
"We initially only used an Oracle database, but we decided to add PostgreSQL as an option because of its similarity to Oracle, and because it is free and the best open source database."
"PostgreSQL has taken a quantum leap over the last 20 years, and now it seriously threatens more established database vendors."
"This solution is very good and efficient in joining big tables."
"It's been really easy to learn and it's been useful since ramping up it use."
"Great documentation, active community support, excellent management and development tools and availability on various platforms makes PostgreSQL a good data base management system."
"Vespa is very good and it improves our product, and we got more clients."
"The best feature to me is the LTR feature, the ranking feature to be specific."
"The most outstanding features and characteristics of Vespa include an architecture that lets you focus on implementing features, the function that automatically manages sharding and shards is excellent, and the flexibility of the server cluster and infrastructure architecture is outstanding."
"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."
 

Cons

"I would like to have better support for real-time applications."
"PostgreSQL could improve by providing a geographical solution for tracking trucks and people in the field. They might already have features similar to this and I have not found them. I haven't done research about this topic."
"PostgreSQL is a stable system, but from a security point of view, it still needs improvement."
"The stability was an issue, because when coding under Eclipse with Java, some errors occurred while trying to connect to the database, so troubleshooting may be difficult, since you don't know if it's a Java coding issue or a PostgreSQL translation issue."
"I'd like to see better memory management. I think that that's one of the few areas that Postgres does not handle as well as MySQL does or did."
"If it was free to use, it would be the perfect solution."
"They need to work towards making it work better in a cloud environment."
"Extensibility could be even better as there are still too many things that require programming in C to add to the database."
"The integration is actually a pain."
"There were aspects of Vespa that needed improvement, such as if a monitoring dashboard were provided—and not only the monitoring dashboard, but also related supplementary tools for the administrative aspects—that would be better."
"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."
"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

"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"We use the open-source version of PostgreSQL and not the enterprise edition."
"It is an open-source platform."
"Affordable solution."
"There is an annual license."
"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."
"It is free, but if you need support, you can go for the commercial version called EnterpriseDB. They provide paid support, and they can even do hosting for you if you want standby and support."
"It is also open-source so it is free."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Open Source Databases solutions are best for your needs.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise48
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 purchased from the marketplace, so licensing and pricing cost is acceptable. To be honest, there is a separate team who handles the cost of licensing everything. I have admin access on Azure and ...
What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?
The only thing for PG vector is if the dimension limit could be increased. Currently, the dimension limit is around 1,000 to 1,052. If I need to increase the dimension to 3,000 or 5,000, that optio...
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

1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg
1. Yahoo 2. Verizon Media 3. Oath 4. Tumblr 5. AOL 6. Huffington Post 7. TechCrunch 8. Engadget 9. MapQuest 10. Moviefone 11. Autoblog 12. AOL Mail 13. Yahoo Mail 14. Yahoo Finance 15. Yahoo Sports 16. Yahoo News 17. Yahoo Search 18. Yahoo Answers 19. Yahoo Messenger 20. Yahoo Groups 21. Yahoo Weather 22. Yahoo Maps 23. Yahoo Fantasy Sports 24. Yahoo TV 25. Yahoo Movies 26. Yahoo Music 27. Yahoo Style 28. Yahoo Beauty 29. Yahoo Travel 30. Yahoo Autos 31. Yahoo Health 32. Yahoo Tech
Find out what your peers are saying about PostgreSQL vs. Vespa and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.