Algolia
Hosted search-as-a-service platform delivering real-time, full-text search for apps and websites
Vespa
Real-time AI-powered search and recommendation at any scale
Vespa delivers low-latency search, recommendation and AI inference over vectors, tensors, text and structured data, supporting massive distributed deployments with high availability.
Overview
Overview
Vespa is a platform for building AI-driven search, recommendation and personalization services that operate at query time. It evaluates machine-learned models over text, vectors, tensors and structured data, delivering results in under 100 ms even as the corpus continuously evolves.
Deployment
Deployments can run on the managed Vespa Cloud (console.vespa-cloud.com) with a free trial, or be self-hosted on Linux using the provided Docker or source builds. Daily releases from the master branch keep the system up-to-date, and extensive documentation and Java/C++ APIs simplify integration.
Audience
The engine targets data-intensive applications such as e-commerce, media platforms, and enterprise search where low latency, high throughput and real-time model inference are critical. Developers can define schemas, write custom ranking functions in Java, and leverage Vespa’s built-in distributed storage to handle billions of documents with automatic sharding and replication.
Highlights
Real-time vector and tensor search with built-in ranking models
Scalable, fault-tolerant architecture handling billions of documents
Integrated machine‑learning inference at query time
Flexible deployment: managed cloud service or self‑hosted on Linux
Pros
- Sub‑100 ms latency at large scale
- Supports text, vectors, tensors, and structured data
- Apache 2.0 open‑source license
- Rich Java and C++ APIs with extensive documentation
Considerations
- Self‑hosting requires distributed‑systems expertise
- Setup can be complex on non‑Linux platforms
- Limited graphical tooling compared to some SaaS offerings
- Steep learning curve for Vespa query language and schema design
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Fit guide
Great for
- Teams building AI-driven search or recommendation engines
- Applications needing low-latency, high-throughput query serving
- Organizations that prefer self‑hosted control over data
- Projects requiring hybrid text‑vector retrieval
Not ideal when
- Small hobby projects with minimal traffic
- Users seeking a plug‑and‑play SaaS without infrastructure management
- Scenarios requiring only simple keyword search without ML
- Environments lacking Linux or Docker support
How teams use it
E‑commerce product search with personalized ranking
Delivers sub‑100 ms results combining text relevance, vector similarity, and real-time user behavior models.
News article recommendation
Generates on‑the‑fly recommendations by evaluating collaborative-filtering models over billions of articles.
Semantic code search
Indexes code embeddings and returns relevant snippets using vector similarity and language-specific filters.
Fraud detection query service
Runs lightweight ML models at query time to flag suspicious transactions while maintaining high throughput.
Tech snapshot
Java52%
C++45%
Go1%
CMake1%
Shell1%
JavaScript1%
Frequently asked questions
Is Vespa a hosted service or can I run it locally?
You can use the managed Vespa Cloud service or deploy a self-hosted instance on any Linux machine.
What programming languages are supported for building applications?
Vespa provides Java and C++ APIs; client libraries exist for Python, Go, and other languages via HTTP/JSON.
How does Vespa handle model updates?
Models are packaged as components and can be redeployed without downtime; Vespa reloads them automatically.
What is the licensing model?
Vespa is released under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing free use, modification, and distribution.
Can Vespa be used for pure vector-database workloads?
Yes, Vespa natively stores and searches vectors, supporting ANN algorithms alongside traditional search.
Project at a glance
Active- Stars
- 6,737
- Watchers
- 6,737
- Forks
- 694
LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age9 years old
Last commit3 hours ago
Self-hostingSupported
Primary languageJava
Last synced 3 hours ago