AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Zep – pgvector-based memory store for LLM apps
Hey HN - we launched Zep's document vector DB today. Zep is an open source memory store for LLM apps, and this builds on existing chat history memory persistence, embedding, and enrichment capabilities. Zep uses Postgres and pgvector for database operations and vector search. Vector search can be complicated on Postgres, with careful configuration required at both index creation and query time. We've focused on significantly improving this developer experience. Zep automatically selects index and query parameters for developers based on best practices and known heuristics. Vector database…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Zep – pgvector-based memory store for LLM apps launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

Contribute to Z-Gort/Reservoirs-Lab development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

Hey HN! I built a proof-of-concept for AI memory using Git instead of vector databases. The insight: Git already solved versioned document management. Why are we building complex vector stores when we could just use markdown files with Git's built-in diff/blame/history? How it works: Memories stored as markdown files in a Git repo Each conversation = one commit git diff shows how understanding evolves over time BM25 for search (no embeddings needed) LLMs generate search queries from conversation context Example: Ask "how has my project evolved?" and it uses git diff to show actual…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3ZL
Zep is a long-term memory store designed for conversational AI applications built using modern LLMs. It handles the storage, summarization, embedding, indexing, and enrichment of chat histories, and offers developers a simple, low-latency API to this data. Chat history storage is an infrastructure challenge all developers and enterprises face as they look to move from prototypes to deploying conversational AI applications that provide rich and intimate experiences to users. Key features include long-term memory persistence, auto-summarization, vector search, auto-token counting, and Python…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 4LA
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 →
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Scalable, Low-latency and Hybrid-enabled Vector Search in Postgres. Revolutionize Vector Search, not Database. - tensorchord/pgvecto.rs
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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In-memory Postgres for unit/E2E tests. Contribute to hexclave/pgmock development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Built this for my LLM workflows - needed searchable, persistent memory that wouldn't blow up storage costs. I also wanted to use it locally for my research. It's a content-addressed storage system with block-level deduplication (saves 30-40% on typical codebases). I have integrated the CLI tool into most of my workflows in Zed, Claude Code, and Cursor, and I provide the prompt I'm currently using in the repo. The project is in C++ and the build system is rough around the edges but is tested on macOS and Ubuntu 24.04.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Vectorized executor to speed up PostgreSQL. Contribute to citusdata/postgres_vectorization_test development by creating an account on GitHub.
2014 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10

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 →
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Local persistent memory store for LLM applications including claude desktop, github copilot, codex, antigravity, etc. - CaviraOSS/LongMemory
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13

Hey HN! We're Paul, Preston, and Daniel from Zep. We've just open-sourced Graphiti, a Python library for building temporal Knowledge Graphs using LLMs. Graphiti helps you create and query graphs that evolve over time. Knowledge Graphs have been explored extensively for information retrieval. What makes Graphiti unique is its ability to build a knowledge graph while handling changing relationships and maintaining historical context. At Zep, we build a memory layer for LLM applications. Developers use Zep to recall relevant user information from past conversations without including the entire…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
PMB▲211PMB gives Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Zed a real memory. Decisions, lessons and facts in one SQLite file on your disk. Offline, no API keys, no cloud.
Jun 2026 · pmbai.dev · its alternatives →
- 15VY
2025 · vectorvfs.readthedocs.io · its alternatives →
- 16

Hey HN! We’re Kevin and Steve. We’re building PromptTools (https://github.com/hegelai/prompttools): open-source, self-hostable tools for experimenting with, testing, and evaluating LLMs, vector databases, and prompts. Evaluating prompts, LLMs, and vector databases is a painful, time-consuming but necessary part of the product engineering process. Our tools allow engineers to do this in a lot less time. By “evaluating” we mean checking the quality of a model's response for a given use case, which is a combination of testing and benchmarking. As examples: - For generated…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17

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…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18

I keep running in the same problem of each AI app “remembers” me in its own silo. ChatGPT knows my project details, Cursor forgets them, Claude starts from zero… so I end up re-explaining myself dozens of times a day across these apps. The deeper problem 1. Not portable – context is vendor-locked; nothing travels across tools. 2. Not relational – most memory systems store only the latest fact (“sticky notes”) with no history or provenance. 3. Not yours – your AI memory is sensitive first-party data, yet you have no control over where it lives or how it’s queried. Demo video:…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

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 →
- 20

A Vector Store written in Go - Supports hybrid retrieval over BM25, Flat, HNSW, IVF, PQ and IVFPQ Index with Quantization, Metadata Filtering, Reranking, Reciprocal Rank Fusion, Soft Deletes, Index Rebuilds and much much more - 0xnyn/comet
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21

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 →
- 22

I built a super easy to integrate memory storage and retrieval system for NodeJS projects because I saw a need for information to be shared and persisted across LLM chat sessions (and many other LLM feature interactions). I tried to keep the barrier to use as low as possible so I included built-in support for major LLMs (GPT, Gemini, and Claude) as well as major vector store providers (Weaviate and Pinecone). The memory store works by ingesting and automatically extracting “memories” (summarized single bits of information) from LLM interactions and vectorizing those. When you want to provide…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A look at modern database approaches and how Citus scales PG
2016 · softwareengineeringdaily.com · its alternatives →
- 24

Also compare
- Postgres as a VectorDB GUI alternatives
- I replaced vector databases with Git for AI memory (PoC) alternatives
- Zep – Long-Term Memory Store for LLM Apps alternatives
- Lantern – a PostgreSQL vector database for building AI applications alternatives
- 20x faster pgvector alternative written in Rust alternatives
- CloseVector 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 →