pgvector VS pg_search

Compare pgvector vs pg_search and see what are their differences.

pgvector

Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres (by pgvector)

pg_search

pg_search builds ActiveRecord named scopes that take advantage of PostgreSQL’s full text search (by Casecommons)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
pgvector pg_search
77 7
8,697 1,223
10.9% 2.5%
9.7 6.8
about 13 hours ago 3 months ago
C Ruby
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pgvector

Posts with mentions or reviews of pgvector. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-21.

pg_search

Posts with mentions or reviews of pg_search. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-16.
  • The Ultimate Search for Rails - Episode 1
    8 projects | dev.to | 16 Jan 2023
    On the backend, we'll need a few tools. Apart from the classics (ActiveRecord scopes and the pg_search gem), you’ll see how the (yet officially unreleased but production-tested) all_futures gem, built by SR authors, will act as an ideal ephemeral object to temporarily store our filter params and host our search logic. Finally, we’ll use pagy for pagination duties.
  • Application Search Feature more that ActiveRecord;
    2 projects | /r/rails | 15 May 2022
    You can take a look at pg_search if you’re using Postgres
  • Instant search with Rails 6 and Hotwire
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Aug 2021
    Cleaner, more performant database queries: Definitely don't just leave your query sitting in the controller! For production use cases, you'd want to consider an option like pg_search
  • Postgres Full-Text Search: A Search Engine in a Database
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jul 2021
    If you are using Rails with Postgres you can use pg_search gem to build the named scopes to take advantage of full text search.

    https://github.com/Casecommons/pg_search

  • Tips for optimizing pg_search?
    2 projects | /r/rails | 14 Apr 2021
    Hey guys. Looking to release an app for mobile that will be using a rails API. The app will heavily rely on search. I know the go-to is to use elasticsearch but wanted to see if there was enough user demand for the MVP before shelling out $50/mo for the heroku add on. In the mean time I've been using pg_search. From the eye test it's performing okay but will be adding a table that houses over 350K records. With this in mind I was wondering if you all had any tips for increasing the overall speed for search from the model and controller level. Also should note that I'm open to any other free search gems if they deem bette fit.
  • Rails Search Bar
    2 projects | dev.to | 18 Oct 2020
    There are two basic search configurations with pg_search, a Single Model search scope or a multi Model configuration. In my case I am only using the Single Model configuration, but you can read more about multi-search in the documentation.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pgvector and pg_search you can also consider the following projects:

Milvus - A cloud-native vector database, storage for next generation AI applications

faiss - A library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors.

ransack - Object-based searching.

Weaviate - Weaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance and scalability of a cloud-native database​.

Elasticsearch - Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

qdrant - Qdrant - High-performance, massive-scale Vector Database for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/

Elasticsearch Rails - Elasticsearch integrations for ActiveModel/Record and Ruby on Rails

ann-benchmarks - Benchmarks of approximate nearest neighbor libraries in Python

textacular - Textacular exposes full text search capabilities from PostgreSQL, and allows you to declare full text indexes. Textacular will extend ActiveRecord with named_scope methods making searching easy and fun!

elasticsearch-ruby - Ruby integrations for Elasticsearch

Searchkick - Intelligent search made easy

pinecone - Peer-to-peer overlay routing for the Matrix ecosystem