Skip to content

Vector DBLantern

Lantern

Open-source Postgres vector database for AI apps.

Category
Vector DB
Pricing
FREEMIUM
Source
Open core
Hosting
Hybrid
Platforms
APILinuxmacOS
Models
Model-agnostic
Verified
Jun 20, 2026

Lantern is a PostgreSQL extension and managed cloud service that turns Postgres into a production vector database for AI. It implements HNSW indexing for fast approximate nearest-neighbour search and layers on embedding generation, vector compression, and hybrid search that combines vector similarity with BM25 full-text and reranking — all inside the database teams already run.

Capabilities 3

What it actually does — grouped by capability family.

  • Vector search (primary capability)
  • Embeddings (secondary capability)
  • RAG pipeline (secondary capability)

Pros & cons

  • Lives inside the Postgres you already run
  • Open-source, self-host or managed cloud
  • HNSW plus hybrid BM25 search
  • Built-in embedding generation
  • Tied to the Postgres ecosystem
  • Smaller community than pgvector
  • Managed cloud tier still maturing

Tags

View all Vector DB
  • View pgvector details
    Vector DBFREEOSS

    pgvector

    pgvector community

    Vector similarity search inside Postgres. The pragmatic default.

    Postgres extension that adds a vector type plus exact and approximate nearest-neighbour search. Pairs naturally with Supabase, Neon, and any managed Postgres. The lowest-friction RAG backend if you already run Postgres.

    No new database to operate
    Scales worse than dedicated vector DBs
    • postgres
    • open-source
    • extension
    • rag
  • View Qdrant details
    Vector DBFREEMIUMOpen core

    Qdrant

    Qdrant

    Open-source, Rust-based vector DB. Fast, predictable, self-hostable.

    Vector database written in Rust with a strong focus on filtering, payloads, and predictable latency at scale. Self-host on a single binary or use the managed cloud.

    Open source, written in Rust
    More ops than fully-managed rivals
    • open-source
    • rust
    • self-hosted
    • fast
  • View Pinecone details
    Vector DBFREEMIUM

    Pinecone

    Pinecone

    Fully-managed serverless vector database for RAG and semantic search.

    Fully-managed vector DB built for production RAG and semantic search at scale. Serverless pricing, low-latency reads, and integrations across every major framework, with no infrastructure to provision or operate.

    No infra to provision or operate
    No self-host option
    • managed
    • serverless
    • rag
    • semantic-search
  • View LanceDB details
    Vector DBFREEMIUMOpen core

    LanceDB

    LanceDB

    Embedded multimodal vector database on the Lance format.

    An open-source retrieval engine for AI built on the Lance columnar format. It runs in-process alongside your app — no separate server — and stores, indexes, and searches vectors, metadata, and multimodal data (text, images, video) with vector, full-text, and SQL queries. A managed enterprise lakehouse tier scales the same engine to petabytes.

    Embeds in your app; runs on edge/desktop
    Newer; smaller community than Qdrant/Milvus
    • vector-search
    • multimodal
    • embedded
    • lance
    • +1