Weaviate

Free managed cloud plan (100k objects, 1GB memory, 10GB disk) to explore without self-hosting

What Weaviate does

  • Free managed cloud plan (100k objects, 1GB memory, 10GB disk) to explore without self-hosting
  • Open-source core project can be self-hosted for free indefinitely, same engine as the managed cloud
  • Built-in hybrid (vector + keyword) search and native embedding/query-agent integrations

Weaviate — straight answers

What is Weaviate?

Weaviate is listed under Vector Databases & RAG Infra, in the Code & Development category on Flocci AI Tools. Free managed cloud plan (100k objects, 1GB memory, 10GB disk) to explore without self-hosting. It is freemium — a usable free tier with paid plans above it, and it lives at weaviate.io.

Is Weaviate free?

Weaviate is freemium: there is a free tier you can work in and paid plans above it. It is one of 426 freemium tools in the catalog, all labelled the same way so you are never surprised by a paywall.

Can I use Weaviate in a browser, or is there an app?

Weaviate works in a normal browser tab with no install. It is available on the web, self-hosting and an API.

What can Weaviate do?

Weaviate does 3 things the catalog singles out: Free managed cloud plan (100k objects, 1gb memory, 10gb disk) to explore without self-hosting; open-source core project can be self-hosted for free indefinitely, same engine as the managed cloud; built-in hybrid (vector + keyword) search and native embedding/query-agent integrations.

What is the best free alternative to Weaviate?

Vespa is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same Vector Databases & RAG Infra sub-category and is free. LanceDB, Microsoft GraphRAG and Milvus also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.

See the full list →

Weaviate alternatives

Compare all alternatives →

Qdrant

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freemium
  • Open-source Rust-based vector database, self-hostable for free with no scale limit
  • Managed free tier cluster (0.5 vCPU/1GB RAM/4GB disk) for prototyping RAG apps with no card required for OSS use
  • Hybrid Cloud option to run managed clusters on your own infrastructure for compliance-sensitive RAG

Chroma

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freemium
  • Fully open-source embedded/self-hosted vector store, the default choice bundled into countless RAG tutorials and frameworks
  • Chroma Cloud managed tier starts with free usage credits, no subscription
  • Simple Python/JS-native API designed to be the easiest on-ramp to RAG for developers

Microsoft GraphRAG

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freeNew
  • Builds knowledge graphs and community summaries from private text for RAG
  • Answers global, dataset-wide questions that vector RAG misses
  • Open-source Python library and CLI
  • Works with OpenAI-compatible and local models

Milvus

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freeNew
  • Cloud-native Apache-2.0 vector database for large-scale similarity search
  • Runs from a single-file Lite mode to distributed clusters
  • Managed Zilliz Cloud has a separate free tier

LanceDB

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freeNew
  • Embedded, developer-friendly retrieval library for multimodal AI
  • Columnar Lance format with vector and full-text search
  • Apache-2.0

pgvector

Vector Databases & RAG Infra
freeNew
  • Open-source vector similarity search extension for Postgres
  • HNSW and IVFFlat indexes with exact and approximate search
  • Available on most managed Postgres hosts

Head-to-head comparisons