AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to EdgeVec – Sub-millisecond vector search in the browser (Rust/WASM)

Hi HN, I built EdgeVec, a vector database that runs entirely in the browser. It implements HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) graphs for approximate nearest neighbor search. Performance: - Sub-millisecond search at 100k vectors (768 dimensions, k=10) - 148 KB gzipped bundle - 3.6x memory reduction with scalar quantization Use cases: browser extensions with semantic search, local-first apps, privacy-preserving RAG. Technical: Written in Rust, compiled to WASM. Uses AVX2 SIMD on native, simd128 on WASM. IndexedDB for browser persistence. npm:…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1
A fast HNSW implementation in Rust▲111
HNSW implementation in Rust. Reference: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1603/1603.09320.pdf - swapneel/hnsw-rust
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
SeekStorm – open-source sub-millisecond search in Rust▲245
SeekStorm: vector & lexical search - in-process library & multi-tenancy server, in Rust. - SeekStorm/SeekStorm
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
Building a web search engine from scratch with 3B neural embeddings▲699
End-to-end deep dive of the project, spanning a large GPU cluster, distributed RocksDB, and terabytes of sharded HNSW.
2025 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →
4
Vector – A High-Performance Log and Metric Router Written in Rust▲322
A high-performance observability data pipeline. Contribute to vectordotdev/vector development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust▲597
A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…
2025 · desktopdocs.com · its alternatives →
6
HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust)▲237
Hey HN, we want to share HelixDB (https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/), a project a college friend and I are working on. It’s a new database that natively intertwines graph and vector types, without sacrificing performance. It’s written in Rust and our initial focus is on supporting RAG. Here’s a video runthrough: https://screen.studio/share/szgQu3yq. Why a hybrid? Vector databases are useful for similarity queries, while graph databases are useful for relationship queries. Each stores data in a way that’s best for its main type of query (e.g.…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
Victor, a browser-optimized vector database written in Rust▲27
Hey HN, My friend Sam and I were bored one weekend, and wanted to make something self-contained but still useful. We ended up with Victor [0], a vector database designed to run in the browser. It’s written in Rust, which gives us access to things like super-fast and compact serialization and deserialization, but it’s compiled to WASM and uses web-sys to interact with the browser’s JS APIs to write the database contents to disk. We worked hard on designing it in a way that makes sense for the browser. It uses the private origin file system [1] and stores the vectors in a compact format (one…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
TurboQuant for vector search – 2-4 bit compression▲89
A vector index built on TurboQuant, written in Rust with Python bindings - RyanCodrai/turbovec
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
Model2vec-Rs – Fast Static Text Embeddings in Rust▲60
Hey HN! We’ve just open-sourced model2vec-rs, a Rust crate for loading and running Model2Vec static embedding models with zero Python dependency. This allows you to embed text at (very) high throughput; for example, in a Rust-based microservice or CLI tool. This can be used for semantic search, retrieval, RAG, or any other text embedding usecase. Main Features: - Rust-native inference: Load any Model2Vec model from Hugging Face or your local path with StaticModel::from_pretrained(...). - Tiny footprint: The crate itself is only ~1.7 mb, with embedding models between 7 and 30 mb. Performance:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
10
20x faster pgvector alternative written in Rust▲23
Scalable, Low-latency and Hybrid-enabled Vector Search in Postgres. Revolutionize Vector Search, not Database. - tensorchord/pgvecto.rs
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
HNSW index for vector embeddings in approx 500 LOC▲73
Heirarchical Navigable Small Worlds. Contribute to dicroce/hnsw development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
Glidesort, a new stable sort in Rust up to ~4x faster for random data▲389
Hi all, I've talked about glidesort a few times on HN already, but it's finally ready for release. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. An academic paper on glidesort that goes into a lot more detail than the readme is upcoming, but is not ready yet. I will be giving a talk on glidesort tomorrow at FOSDEM 2023 in the Rust Devroom at 16:10, you can seek me out there as well. In other news, I am leaving academia soon, so if you have interesting (Rust) jobs the coming months feel free to approach me.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
13
Hyvector – A fast and modern SVG editor▲331
I have been working on Hyvector for the last five years and finally decided to present the result of my work. Hyvector is an SVG editor that runs in all modern browsers. It is stable, very fast, and capable of handling complex SVG images. Big new features like art strokes, vector tracing, colorizing are in the making, but for now the focus is on pushing a polished first release out of the door. I would love to hear any feedback on what you like, missing features, or any bugs you encounter via our issue tracker: https://github.com/hyvectorapp/hyvector-issues Note that…
2025 · hyvector.com · its alternatives →
14
Fast vector similarity using Rust and Python▲141
I recently found myself computing the similarity between lots of very high dimensional vectors (i.e., sentence embedding vectors from LLMs), and I wanted to try some more powerful measures of similarity/dependency than just Cosine similarity, which seems to be the default for everything nowadays because of its computational efficiency. There are many other more involved measures that can detect more subtle relationships, but the problem is that some of them are quite slow to compute, especially if you're trying to do it in Python. For my favorite measure of statistical dependency,…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
CloseVector▲100
Portable Vector database
2023 · closevector.getmegaportal.com · its alternatives →
16
Laminar – Open-Source DataDog + PostHog for LLM Apps, Built in Rust▲203
Hey HN, we’re Robert, Din and Temirlan from Laminar (https://www.lmnr.ai), an open-source observability and analytics platform for complex LLM apps. It’s designed to be fast, reliable, and scalable. The stack is RabbitMQ for message queues, Postgres for storage, Clickhouse for analytics, Qdrant for semantic search - all powered by Rust. How is Laminar different from the swarm of other “LLM observability” platforms? On the observability part, we’re focused on handling full execution traces, not just LLM calls. We built a Rust ingestor for OpenTelemetry (Otel) spans with GenAI…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
Model2vec – Lightning-fast Static Embeddings for RAG/Semantic Search▲28
We’ve recently open-sourced Model2vec, a method to distill sentence transformers into static embeddings that outperform all previous approaches by a large margin on MTEB. Our new models set a new state-of-the-art for static embeddings. Main features: - Our best model (potion-base-8M) has only 8M parameters, which is ~30mb on disk - Inference is ~500x faster than the distilled base model (bge-base), on a CPU - New models can be distilled in 30 seconds on a CPU without requiring a dataset - just a vocabulary - Numpy-only inference: The packaged can be install the package with minimal…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
18
TinkerBird – A Chrome-native vector database▲107
Client Side Vector Database. Contribute to 0xnyn/tinkerbird development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
Client Vector Search – Embeddings and Semantic Search with 5 Lines▲11
Hey HN, we're excited to show you client-vector-search, a client-side library that helps you embed, store, search, and cache vectors in your browser or node env. We needed it at https://searchbase.app and that's why we've built it. with it you get: 1. easy setup: you only need to add 5 lines of code to build a semantic search 2. no embedding api needed: you don't need an api and have to pay for it unless ure scaling up millions 3. faster search: modern hardware is better than cheap cloud computers (0.5vCPUs) 4. zero latency: no back-and-forth with server-side 5. easy integration…
2023 · clientvectorsearch.com · its alternatives →
20
A Parallel Implementation of Graph2Vec▲53
A parallel implementation of "graph2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Graphs" (MLGWorkshop 2017). - benedekrozemberczki/graph2vec
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
Denormalized – Embeddable Stream Processing in Rust and DataFusion▲125
tl;dr we built an embeddable stream processing engine in Rust using apache DataFusion, check us out at https://github.com/probably-nothing-labs/denormalized Hey HN, We’d like to showcase a very early version of our embeddable stream processing engine called Denormalized. The rise of DuckDB has abundantly made it clear that even for many workloads of Terabyte scale, a single node system outshines the distributed query engines of previous generation such as Spark, Snowflake etc in terms of both performance and cost. Now a lot of workloads DuckDB is used for were normally…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
Client-Side WASM Vector Search▲5
🕸️🦀 A WASM vector similarity search written in Rust - tantaraio/voy
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
TurboQuant-WASM – Google's vector quantization in the browser▲165
TurboQuant WASM SIMD vector compression — 3 bits/dim with fast dot product. Requires relaxed SIMD (Chrome 114+, Firefox 128+, Safari 18+, Node 20+) - teamchong/turboquant-wasm
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
Epsilla – Open-source vector database with low query latency▲111
Hey HN! We are building Epsilla (https://github.com/epsilla-cloud/vectordb), an open-source, self-hostable vector database for semantic similarity search that specializes in low query latency. When do we need a vector database? For example, GPT-3.5 has a 16k context window limit. If we want to let it answer a question about a 300 page book, we cannot put the whole book content into the context. We have to choose the sections of the book that are most relevant to the question. Vector database is specialized at ranking and picking the most relevant content from a large pool…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

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