Every option in the catalog for when you need to store embeddings and retrieve them for a RAG app — 10 vector databases and RAG infrastructure, 10 of them free or freemium, with the pricing tier printed on every row.
Flocci AI Tools lists 10 of them, ordered free tiers first: Vespa, LanceDB, Microsoft GraphRAG, Milvus and pgvector. Every one of them is free or has a free tier. Each entry states what it uniquely does rather than a score.
6 on this page are marked fully free with no paid plan at all: Vespa, LanceDB, Microsoft GraphRAG, Milvus and pgvector. The remaining 4 are freemium, trial or paid, and each is labelled with its exact tier so nothing surprises you at sign-up.
Free tools first, then freemium, then trial, then paid, and alphabetically inside each tier. Nobody pays to appear higher: Flocci AI Tools carries no ads, no sponsored slots and no paid listings, so the order reflects price and nothing else.
Vespa, Chroma, Pinecone, Qdrant and Weaviate all work in a browser tab with no install needed — just open the site and go. 5 of the 10 free vector databases and RAG infrastructure listed here are browser-based.
Chroma, Pinecone and Qdrant support Google sign-in, so you can start without creating a new account. That's 3 of the 10 free vector databases and RAG infrastructure on this page.
LanceDB, Microsoft GraphRAG, Milvus, pgvector and txtai can be self-hosted or run locally without a browser — useful for privacy, air-gapped networks, or avoiding API rate limits. 5 of the 10 free vector databases and RAG infrastructure here run offline.
| Tool | Pricing | Type | Listed for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vespa | Free | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Open-source AI search platform combining vector, text and structured search |
| LanceDB | Free | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Embedded, developer-friendly retrieval library for multimodal AI |
| Microsoft GraphRAG | Free | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Builds knowledge graphs and community summaries from private text for RAG |
| Milvus | Free | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Cloud-native Apache-2.0 vector database for large-scale similarity search |
| pgvector | Free | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Open-source vector similarity search extension for Postgres |
| txtai | Free | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | All-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and workflows |
| Chroma | Freemium | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Fully open-source embedded/self-hosted vector store, the default choice bundled into countless RAG tutorials and frameworks |
| Pinecone | Freemium | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Fully managed vector database with a free Starter plan |
| Qdrant | Freemium | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Open-source Rust-based vector database, self-hostable for free with no scale limit |
| Weaviate | Freemium | Vector Databases & RAG Infra | Free managed cloud plan (100k objects, 1GB memory, 10GB disk) to explore without self-hosting |