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PostgreSQL vs Vespa comparison

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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
1st
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 September 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of PostgreSQL is 12.0%, down from 16.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vespa is 1.7%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL12.0%
Vespa1.7%
Other86.3%
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's improved security by allowing us to switch from an unsecure file-based database to a secure SQL database without license payments."
"The solution has many valuable features such as it is easy to use and the interface is intuitive."
"PostgreSQL is far more robust and mature than MySQL, especially when you think about keys and indexes."
"It is easy to install and easy to manage."
"The built-in code procedural language is the most valuable. It has a built-in layer for code procedures. Its installation is very easy and quick, and it is free. It is also stable, and its performance is also good."
"Open source products represent no cost to the organization and the basic features are sufficient to fulfill our needs."
"We managed to reduce the storage space needed to 10% of the original size, without affecting data integrity, and we significantly improved the performance."
"PostgreSQL provides the structured persistence layer that makes my AI experimentation and evaluation processes manageable, repeatable, and scalable."
"The best feature to me is the LTR feature, the ranking feature to be specific."
"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."
"Vespa is very good and it improves our product, and we got more clients."
 

Cons

"The only thing I would really want/need to improve is pgAdmin3."
"Less advanced programmers may have a bit of a learning curve."
"It tends to be slower when processing a large number of records."
"I believe that drivers must be better."
"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."
"It was a bit complex to setup, although I think this was due to ignorance on the project."
"It requires enterprise integration improvements from the security, and audit perspective (AD integration etc.). Also, integration into existing BI tools is not present."
"The user interface could be a bit better."
"The integration is actually a pain."
"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

"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"There is an annual license."
"The solution requires a license."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
"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."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"The licensing model is good."
"The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Wholesaler/Distributor
7%
 

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

 

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Find out what your peers are saying about PostgreSQL vs. Vespa and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.