# Qdrant alternative. Vector search without the RAM tax.

Evaluating Qdrant? LanceDB scales on object storage with compute-storage separation. No HNSW parameter tuning. No segment optimization. No shard management.

## Comparison

| Feature           | Qdrant                                           | LanceDB                                                         |
|-------------------|--------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Cost**          | RAM-heavy architecture with full shard replication. $3-5/GB/month. | Object storage at $0.02/GB/month with compute-storage separation. Up to 100x savings. |
| **Scale**         | Requires shard management, segment rebalancing, storage amplification. | Stateless scaling. No sharding decisions, no rebalancing. 20 PB largest table. |
| **Search**        | Vector only. No native full-text search. Requires external sparse vectorization. | Native vector, full-text, and SQL hybrid search in one query. |
| **Metadata**      | Metadata in RocksDB. Must be fully indexed in RAM.  | Arrow-native columnar format. Efficient WHERE filtering and analytics. |
| **Operations**    | Continuous tuning - segment sizes, HNSW params (ef, m), optimizer thresholds. | Zero tuning. Asynchronous indexing handles balance automatically. |
| **Best for**      | When tuning for peak single-query latency is everything. | Cost-efficient scale with zero operational complexity.

## The Power of the Lance Format

### Vector Search

- Fast scans and random access from the same table — no tradeoff
- Zero-copy access for high throughput without serialization overhead

### Multi-Modal

- Raw data, embeddings, and metadata in one table — not pointers to blob storage
- No separate metadata store to keep in sync

## Enterprise-Grade Requirements

### Security

Granular RBAC, SSO integration, and VPC deployment options.

### Governance

Data versioning and time-travel capabilities for auditability.

### Support

Dedicated technical account management and guaranteed SLAs.