Top vector databases compared

About Top vector databases compared

Vector databases sit under everything that searches by meaning, and choosing one usually comes down to a single trade-off: how little you pay to start, and what the bill looks like once the index holds real data. This ranking sets out 171 providers on that basis, with the picks ordered by what a working prototype would cost you. The median entry price in this category is €4.38, and the middle of the range runs €3.07 to €9.05, with the cheapest entries at €0. A free tier is offered by 84.5% of the brands, and 58.3% keep the control plane free. Monthly billing appears at 82.5% and hourly billing at 77.2%. Underneath the price, two things separate the field: where the data runs, and who you can reach when a query turns slow.

How we picked

Each provider is scored on three axes, and the weights are published rather than kept quiet. Cost carries 40% of the score, which is why entry fees, free tiers and stated rates matter so much in this category. The offer carries 40%, covering what the plan includes, which databases are named, and whether a free tier is on the table. Trust carries 20%, drawing on the legal entity you would sign with, the headquarters country, the founding year and the support channels listed for the provider. Every data point behind those scores is taken from a provider's own public material: pricing pages, product documentation, help centres and company profile pages. Each carries its source, so you can follow a number back to the page that published it rather than trusting a summary. Partners are listed first on the site, ahead of scored providers. This ranking holds 0 partner placements, so the order below is score order throughout. Across the wider data set, 523 providers are tracked, and 171 of them sit in this category.

Our top picks

1. 3. SberCloud: best for top-pick

   SberCloud takes the top-pick label in this ranking because it pairs a free tier with the broadest support mix in the table, covering email, phone and chat. The trade-off is where it runs and who you sign with: the company is based in RU and the contract sits with a Russian limited liability company, so teams outside the region should read the terms before they commit. Compare it with RisingWave, which starts at $0.23 and offers a free tier as well, yet documents fewer routes to a human through help centre and community. Both suit a small team testing a prototype at no cost; SberCloud leads this ranking on support reach, RisingWave on a published entry fee.

   • Price per GB per month: RUB 814.68
   • Egress price per GB: RUB 1.15
   • Free egress: 10 TB of outgoing traffic per month

   Pros

   • Outgoing traffic includes 10 TB of outgoing traffic per month each month, so routine transfers cost nothing before RUB 1.15 per GB applies.
   • A free tier plus bonus credits for individuals, legal entities and sole proprietors keeps early testing cheap.
   • Evolution compute starts at RUB 23.75 with 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB NVMe, billed hourly.
   • GPU capacity covers B300, H100, A100, V100 and A40 from RUB 240 an hour, billed per minute.

   Cons

   • Kubernetes has no free control plane, so every cluster adds RUB 2.98 on top of the node price.
   • Infrastructure sits in RU across 9 locations, so there is no reach outside that market.
   • Storage covers object only, so block and file tiers are not part of the same plan.

2. AC4. Alibaba Cloud

   Alibaba Cloud takes a place in the middle of this ranking on breadth of contact rather than headline cost: support runs on email, chat and help centre, one of the broader mixes here, and a free tier is offered for teams testing queries. The contract is with Alibaba Cloud (Singapore) Private Limited, a Singapore registered entity, and the company dates back to 2009, which matters to readers who want a named counterparty outside their home market. Aiven, ranked below, also offers a free tier and names Kafka, PostgreSQL and OpenSearch, with Aiven's entry fees of $5 stated plainly, and reaches you on the shorter help centre, phone and community.

   • Entry price: $4
   • Entry plan: 2 vCPU, 0.5 GiB RAM, 20 GiB ESSD system disk
   • Bandwidth allowance: 200 Mbit/s maximum bandwidth

   Pros

   • The entry server costs $4 and carries 2 vCPU, 0.5 GiB RAM, 20 GiB ESSD system disk, a clear spec for a modest monthly outlay.
   • 31 locations cover Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, far more than the 4 typical count here.
   • Billing runs on monthly and reserved terms, and monthly is the pattern shared by 90.8% of the brands compared.
   • Free credits sit alongside a free tier, so a project can run across products before any charge begins.
   • DDoS protection comes with the compute plans, and object storage is S3-compatible with a free quota for internet egress.

   Cons

   • Support runs on email, chat and help centre only, and phone support is not among that list.
   • Reserved commitments are the least common billing pattern, shared by 15.6% of the brands compared.
   • The entry plan is small, with 200 Mbit/s maximum bandwidth, so transfer-heavy workloads need a larger plan.

3. 6. Google Cloud

   Google Cloud earns a place in this ranking for reasons other than price: it offers a free tier, and the contract is with Google LLC, a company founded in 2008 and based in US, so the counterparty is clearly named. For a team already running other workloads on the same provider, keeping the vector store beside them is the practical argument. The trade-off is contact: help runs on help centre and community, so documentation and a community are the listed routes. Alibaba Cloud, ranked below, also offers a free tier but reaches you on a wider set of email, chat and help centre, including email and chat.

   • Control plane price: $0.10
   • Free control plane: Yes
   • HA control plane price: $0.10

   Pros

   • The control plane is free, and the paid tier sits at $0.10, close to the site median of €0.06.
   • Scale headroom is large: clusters run to 65,000 nodes, well past what most managed offerings in the ranking allow.
   • A free tier and $300 in free credits in credits cover early experiments before any spend.
   • Egress includes 100 a month for North America transfers, which cuts the $0.12 per-GB rate for small-scale traffic.
   • Footprint is wide, with 40 locations and 46 regions, so workloads can sit close to users.

   Cons

   • The control plane is free only inside the allowance, so sustained clusters bill at $0.10 for the standard tier and $0.10 for the highly available one.
   • Egress is charged at $0.12 per GB once the free allowance is used, and traffic to Australia and China is excluded from it.
   • Support runs on help centre and community only, so paid and phone channels are not part of the standard offering.

4. 8. UpCloud

   UpCloud earns its place in this ranking on support. Support runs on email, chat and phone, the widest mix in the table, pairing email, chat and phone with a help centre, which matters when an index stalls at a strange hour. The counterparty is UpCloud Oy, founded in 2011 in FI, an established European operator rather than a new entrant. Cost is the piece to ask about, since UpCloud is ranked here on channels and company standing. Akamai Cloud (Linode), ranked below, is the older house, founded in 2003 in US, and reaches you on email and help centre, a shorter pair.

   • Entry price: €3
   • Entry plan: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB SSD
   • Bandwidth allowance: 250 Mbit/s

   Pros

   • Outbound data costs €0 per GB on every plan, subject to the Fair Transfer Policy, so serving downloads does not add a line to the bill.
   • The entry plan at €3 comes in below Aruba at €1.99 and UCloud at $5.34.
   • Billing runs hourly and monthly with hourly metering, so a test server can be released in the same hour it was created.
   • Servers sit in 15 locations spanning FI, NO and DK, which leaves room to place a box close to its users.
   • The managed Kubernetes control plane is free, and nodes start at €3.

   Cons

   • The highly available control plane option is priced at €60, so a cluster that needs it pays well past the free default.
   • Clusters stop at 120 nodes, a low ceiling for large estates.
   • Server types cover vps only, so dedicated hardware requirements sit outside the range.
   • Object storage at €0.02 per GB per month sits above the site median of €0.01.

5. V10. Vultr

   Vultr sits just below UCloud in this ranking because it combines an entry fee of $2.50 with a separate storage rate of $0.10, so you can see what the index costs once it outgrows a first cluster. The company is The Constant Company, LLC, founded in 2014 and based in US. The con is reach: support runs on help centre and community, so documentation and a community carry it. Google Cloud, ranked next, offers a free tier under Google LLC with the same pair of routes in help centre and community, and price transparency at entry is what separates the two here.

   • Entry price: $2.50
   • Billing models: Hourly, Monthly, Reserved
   • Locations: 33

   Pros

   • Cloud Compute plans start at $2.50 and bill at hourly granularity, which suits game servers and other jobs that stop without warning.
   • A footprint of 33 locations across AU, BR and CA lets one account place workloads near several different audiences.
   • Object Storage is S3-compatible at $0.018 per GB per month, with 1,000 GB of monthly egress included and the remainder at $0 to $0.01.
   • Kubernetes runs on a free control plane at $0 with nodes from $10, and the GPU range covers NVIDIA GB300 NVL72, AMD Instinct MI455X and NVIDIA HGX B300.
   • The trust centre lists SOC 2+ Type II (HIPAA), ISO 27001 and ISO 27017, and DDoS protection comes with the compute range.

   Cons

   • Support runs on help centre and community only, with no phone or live chat channel listed.
   • Egress past the free 1,000 GB bills at $0 to $0.01 per GB, so transfer-heavy workloads keep a running charge.
   • Billing granularity stops at hourly, so a job that runs for minutes is still metered by the hour.

What to look for

The entry price you can plan around

The first question is what a working prototype costs. The median entry price in this ranking is €4.38, the lower quartile is €3.07 and the upper quartile is €9.05, so anything well under the median leaves room to grow before it stings. The ceiling in this field is €236.78.

What a free tier actually covers

A free tier is offered by 84.5% of the brands here, and 58.3% keep the control plane free, so there is little reason to pay before a workload exists. The median node price is €10.09 and the median control plane price is €0.09.

How you get billed

Billing shape decides how painful a spike becomes. Monthly billing is offered by 82.5% of the brands, hourly by 77.2%, per-second by 12.3% and reserved terms by 19.3%.

Where the data runs

The median provider here lists 6.5 locations and the upper quartile reaches 25.5, with points of presence at a median of 1,550. A prototype rarely needs that spread, but replica placement and latency later on do.

Support you can actually reach

A help centre is listed for 89% of the brands, a community for 67.8%, email for 61.6% and phone for 34.2%. The wider the mix, the shorter the path when a query misbehaves.

Storage as the index grows

Vector indexes outgrow the entry rate quickly, so storage matters next. The median price per gigabyte is €0.04, the upper quartile is €0.04, and object storage is offered by 98.3% with compatible object storage interfaces at 97.8%.

Frequently asked questions

Top vector databases compared by country

• Brazil
• Canada
• China
• France
• Germany
• India
• Indonesia
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• South Korea
• Spain
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Vietnam

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• SurferCloud vs Typesense
• SurferCloud vs AWS
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