AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too. The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our…
This Postgres extension enables BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search within PostgreSQL databases. Built by Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor, it allows developers to implement keyword search alongside semantic… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1PT
I built pg_textsearch, a Postgres extension that brings proper BM25 ranking to full-text search. It's designed for AI/RAG workloads where search quality directly impacts LLM output. Postgres native ts_rank lacks corpus-aware signals (no IDF, no TF saturation, no length normalization). This causes mediocre documents to rank above excellent matches, which matters when your LLM depends on retrieval quality. Quick example: CREATE EXTENSION pg_textsearch; CREATE INDEX articles_idx ON articles USING bm25(content); SELECT title, content to_bm25query('database performance', 'articles_idx') AS…
Oct 2025 · docs.tigerdata.com · its alternatives →
- 2PN
We've been hard at work for a few weeks and thought it's time for another update. In case you missed our first post, PostgresML is an end-to-end machine learning solution, running alongside your favorite database. This time we have more of a suite offering: project management, visibility into the datasets and the deployment pipeline decision making. Let us know what you think! Demo link is on the page, and also here: https://demo.postgresml.org
2022 · postgresml.org · its alternatives →
- 3
SereneDBfree▲262Ultra-Fast Search & Analytics Database, Agentic AI ready
Sep 2026 · serenedb.com · its alternatives →
- 4
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 →
- 5
Hey HN! We're Phil and Ming, co-founders of Retake (https://github.com/getretake/retake). Retake is an open source tool that adds keyword and semantic (i.e hybrid) search to databases. We’ve started by extending the capabilities of Postgres with an SDK for lightning-fast queries. We built Retake to fix two issues: keeping vectors in sync with Postgres in real time is difficult, and most vector databases aren’t built for hybrid search. A quick refresher: “keyword search” refers to a technique where results are scored based on the appearance of exact words or terms.…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
This is a Postgres extension that can determine if a query should have an index. For example, for this table: create table book( id int primary key, title text not null ); You can run `index_advisor()` to see if there should be an index on a select statement: select * from index_advisor('select book.id from book where title = $1'); And it will return (summarized): {"CREATE INDEX ON public.book USING btree (title)"} It works particularly well with pg_stat_statements[0] which tracks execution statistics of all SQL statements executed on your Postgres database. It leans heavily on HypoPG[1], an…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7LA
We are excited to share Lantern! Lantern is a PostgreSQL vector database extension for building AI applications. Install and use our extension here: https://github.com/lanterndata/lantern We have the most complete feature set of all the PostgreSQL vector database extensions. Our database is built on top of usearch — a state of the art implementation of HNSW, the most scalable and performant algorithm for handling vector search. There’s three key metrics we track. CREATE INDEX time, SELECT throughput, and SELECT latency. We match or outperform pgvector and pg_embedding…
2023 · docs.lantern.dev · its alternatives →
- 8
Hi HN! We're Evgeny and Arjun, and we’re building a better way to do analytics with Postgres. We love Postgres for its simplicity, power, and rich ecosystem. But engineers have to still get bogged down with heavyweight and expensive OLAP systems when connecting an analytics data stack. Postgres is amazing at OLTP queries, but not for OLAP queries (large data scans and aggregations). Even in this case, we’ve still heard from countless scaling startups that they still try to use only a read replica to run analytics workloads since they don’t want to deal with the data engineering complexity of…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
- 10
This extension let's you write PRQL functions in PostgreSQL. When I first saw PRQL on Hacker News a few months ago, I was immediately captivated by the idea, yet equally disappointed that there was no integration for PostgreSQL. Having previous experience with writing PostgreSQL extensions in C, I thought this was a great opportunity to try out the pgrx framework and decided to integrate PRQL with PostgreSQL myself. The maintainers of both PRQL and pgrx were very nice to work with. Thanks guys.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Blazing fast, instant realtime GraphQL APIs on all your data with fine grained access control, also trigger webhooks on database events. - hasura/graphql-engine
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Polygres▲58Polygres turns the Postgres you already run into internal search for AI agents. Rows, relationships, and embeddings: one hybrid query, one ranked answer.
Jul 2026 · polygres.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Making Postgres and Elasticsearch work together like it's 2023 - zombodb/zombodb
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Hey HN, I built pg-mcp, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for PostgreSQL that provides structured schema inspection and query execution for LLMs and agents. It's multi-tenant and runs over HTTP/SSE (not stdio) Features - Supports multiple database connections from multiple agents - Schema Introspection: Returns table structures, types, indexes and constraints; enriched with descriptions from pg_catalog. (for well documented databases) - Read-Only Queries: Controlled execution of queries via MCP. - EXPLAIN Tool: Helps smart agents optimize queries before execution. - Extension…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
PostgresML▲106You know Postgres, now you know machine learning
2023 · postgresml.org · its alternatives →
- 16
A look at modern database approaches and how Citus scales PG
2016 · softwareengineeringdaily.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Fast time-series extension for PostgreSQL. Contribute to xataio/deltax development by creating an account on GitHub.
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
GraphQL for Postgres. Contribute to solidsnack/GraphpostgresQL development by creating an account on GitHub.
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Meilisearch AI▲241Boost relevance and UX with fast hybrid and semantic search
2025 · meilisearch.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Contribute to Z-Gort/Reservoirs-Lab development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hands-on tutorials to learn Postgres
2022 · crunchydata.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Hey HN! I got nerd-sniped by Bloom Filters this weekend, specifically for searching datasets with high "cardinality" (number of unique items). They're an _amazing_ data structure that, at a fixed size, tracks potential set membership. That means unlike normal b-tree indexes, they don't grow with the number of unique items in the dataset. This makes them great for "needle in a haystack" search (logs, document) as implementations like VictoriaMetrics and Bing's BitFunnel show. I've used them in the past, but they've never been center-stage in my projects. I wanted high cardinality keyword…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23HO
hi hn, hydra ceo here hydra is an open-source extension that adds columnar tables to Postgres for efficient analytical reporting. With Hydra, you can analyze billions of rows instantly without changing code. demo video (5 min): https://youtu.be/1yzxgb0Oyrw github repo: https://github.com/hydradatabase/hydra For 1.0 GA release, aggregate queries are over *60% faster* than Hydra beta due to aggregate vectorization. Spatial indexes (gin, gist, spgist, and rum indexes) and pg_hint_plan are now enabled for performance optimization. postgres is great, but…
2023 · hydra.so · its alternatives →
- 24
JSON support in postgres is superb but sometimes you really want decimal, date, and binary types, "carefree" UTF8 string handling (i.e. no escaping), and robust roundtrippability. So I made an extension for BSON.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Pg_textsearch – BM25 Ranking for Postgres alternatives
- PostgresML, now with analytics and project management alternatives
- SereneDB alternatives
- Building a web search engine from scratch with 3B neural embeddings alternatives
- Retake – Open-Source Hybrid Search for Postgres alternatives
- PostgreSQL index advisor alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →