AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to XTrace – Encrypted vector DB (search embeddings without exposing them)
Hey everyone! This is XTrace. Wanted to share what we’ve been working on for the past year. We built a private vector database from the ground up that performs similarity search on encrypted vectors. The server never sees your plaintext embeddings or documents. The problem we’re trying to solve: every vector DB today requires plaintext on the server. If you're doing RAG over sensitive data (medical, legal, financial), your embeddings — which researchers have shown can be inverted to recover original text — sit exposed on someone else's infrastructure. XTrace encrypts everything on your…
XTrace is a vector database that performs similarity searches on encrypted data without exposing plaintext embeddings or documents to the server. Designed for organizations handling sensitive information in medical… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
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 →
- 2
Paste in my prompt to Claude Code with an embedded API key for accessing my public readonly SQL+vector database, and you have a state-of-the-art research tool over Hacker News, arXiv, LessWrong, and dozens of other high-quality public commons sites. Claude whips up the monster SQL queries that safely run on my machine, to answer your most nuanced questions. There's also an Alerts functionality, where you can just ask Claude to submit a SQL query as an alert, and you'll be emailed when the ultra nuanced criteria is met (and the output changes). Like I want to know when somebody posts about…
Dec 2025 · exopriors.com · its alternatives →
- 3RW
Hi, creator here. This is a demo of our recent work presented at Oakland (IEEE S&P): https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/368. The server and client code are written in Rust and available here: https://github.com/menonsamir/spiral-rs. The general aim of our work is to show that homomorphic encryption is practical today for real-world applications. The server we use to serve this costs $35/month! A quick overview: the client uses homomorphic encryption to encrypt the article number that they would like to retrieve. The server processes the query and…
2022 · spiralwiki.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Supabase Vector▲398The open source backend for AI applications
2023 · supabase.com · its alternatives →
- 5
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 →
- 6
OctaneDB is an open-source vector database for Python that focuses on ultra-fast similarity search for high-dimensional data—perfect for AI/ML, semantic search, and large-scale document or embedding retrieval. What does it do? Store, index, and search millions of embeddings (text, images, etc.) with sub-millisecond query time. Supports in-memory and efficient HDF5 persistent storage. Integrates seamlessly with sentence-transformers for automatic text embedding. Key Features: 10x faster than Pinecone or ChromaDB for vector search and batch insertions. Advanced indexing: HNSW (approximate…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Hey HN, it’s been just over a year since we launched HelixDB (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975423), a project a friend and I started in college. It’s an OLTP graph database built on object-storage, with native vector search and full-text search (FTS). Why graph, vector and FTS? Graph databases provide a natural cognitive model for data, vectors allow for a semantic understanding of the entities and relationships in the graph, and FTS provides more specific filtering. Many AI-driven applications attempt to combine all of these functionalities by stitching together…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8IM
As a grad student (and an ADHDer), I had trouble doing literature review systematically. To combat this, I made a website that finds similar papers using the meaning of the thing I am looking for. I used MixedBread's [^1] embedding model to generate vectors from the abstracts. I store and search similar vectors using Milvus [^2] and finally use Gradio [^3] to serve the frontend. I update the vector database weekly by pulling the metadata dataset from Kaggle [^4]. To speed up the search process on my free oracle instance, I binarise the embeddings and use Hamming distance as a metric. I would…
2024 · papermatch.mitanshu.tech · its alternatives →
- 9
Retriever (https://retriever.corgea.io/), an open-source research project to help users receive secrets and sensitive information without needing a server in the middle. It works by using Public-key cryptography to coordinate the message sharing between the two devices. Read more on why we built it here: https://retriever.corgea.io/why.html
2024 · retriever.corgea.io · its alternatives →
- 10PP
2020 · puree.cc · its alternatives →
- 11
I built [VectorLiteDB (https://github.com/vectorlitedb/vectorlitedb) — a simple, embedded vector database that stores everything in a single file, just like SQLite. The problem: If you’re a developer building AI apps, you usually have two choices for vector search - Set up a server (e.g. Chroma, Weaviate) - Use a cloud service (e.g. Pinecone) That works for production, but it’s overkill when you just want to: - Quickly prototype with embeddings - Run offline without cloud dependencies - Keep your data portable in a single file The inspiration was *SQLite* during…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
ZeroDB▲119An open-source, end-to-end encrypted database protocol
2015 · zerodb.io · its alternatives →
- 13
We have been using graph DBs more and more at work. I found them painful to work with locally and decided to try and build something better.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Free cross-platform deniable encryption cryptoarchiver - GitHub - zorggomat/FractalCryptGUI: Free cross-platform deniable encryption cryptoarchiver
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
🦉⚡️Serverless, distributed vector database as an API - TimeSurgeLabs/athenadb
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 17
Not all improvements come from adding complexity — sometimes it's about removing it. PageIndex takes a different approach to RAG. Instead of relying on vector databases or artificial chunking, it builds a hierarchical tree structure from documents and uses reasoning-based tree search to locate the most relevant sections. This mirrors how humans approach reading: navigating through sections and context rather than matching embeddings. As a result, the retrieval feels transparent, structured, and explainable. It moves RAG away from approximate "semantic vibes" and toward explicit reasoning…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
HelixDB▲105An open-source OLTP graph-vector database built in Rust.
Feb 2026 · helix-db.com · its alternatives →
- 19
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 →
- 20
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 →
- 21
Hey HN We've just released the initial version of our open-source vector embedding pipeline. It's designed to embed large volumes of data. While embedding a few documents for Q&A is straightforward, consistently ingesting gigabytes of unstructured data is a whole different ballgame. By using our API, you can embed raw data and store vectors in your vector database, sidestepping the complexities of cloud infrastructure. Now, in true YC spirit, we're launching before everything is polished. Our Github repo (https://github.com/dgarnitz/vectorflow ) is a work in progress, and…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Client Side Vector Database. Contribute to 0xnyn/tinkerbird development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
A strongly-typed document database that runs on any transactional key-value store. - losfair/RefineDB
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Crosssec▲70Cross-platform cloud storage solution with unique encryption
2016 · crosssec.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- HelixDB – Open-source vector-graph database for AI applications (Rust) alternatives
- Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc. alternatives
- Read Wikipedia privately using homomorphic encryption alternatives
- Supabase Vector alternatives
- Epsilla – Open-source vector database with low query latency alternatives
- OctaneDB – Fast, Open-Source Vector Database for Python 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 →