Alternatives to SurrealDB

3 editor-selected alternatives · SurrealDB overview →

source: tools.alternatives · stored order · active records only; review scores are annotations and never change membership or order

A directional evidence panel appears only when the substitute rationale, trade-offs, sources, and verification date have been recorded. Older selections without that panel remain visible but are unclassified under the new evidence contract.

Milvus

84/100open sourcefreemiumexplicit relation

Milvus is an open-source vector database with 45K+ GitHub stars for billion-scale similarity search. Features GPU-accelerated indexing, hybrid search combining vector and scalar filtering, multi-tenancy, partitioning, and horizontal scaling. Supports HNSW, IVF, DiskANN, and GPU index types. SDKs for Python, Java, Go, and Node.js. Zilliz Cloud offers a managed version. A production-grade foundation for RAG pipelines and recommendation systems at enterprise scale.

Milvus is a distributed open-source vector database (Apache 2.0). Managed Milvus via Zilliz Cloud includes a perpetual Free tier (5GB storage, 2 collections), a Standard tier starting at ~$65/month based on compute units and storage, and custom Enterprise tiers with 99.95% SLAs and HIPAA compliance.Review →

Weaviate

85/100open sourcefreemiumexplicit relation

Weaviate is an open-source vector database purpose-built for AI applications. Supports vector, keyword, and hybrid search with built-in vectorization modules for OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face, and more. Used for RAG pipelines, semantic search, recommendation engines, and multimodal search. Written in Go for high performance.

Weaviate is free and open-source under BSD-3-Clause. Weaviate Cloud provides a persistent Free tier for prototyping (100k objects), a pay-as-you-go Flex plan starting at $45/month on shared infrastructure, Dedicated Cloud starting at $400/month (99.95% SLA), and custom BYOC Enterprise plans.Review →

Qdrant

88/100open sourcefreemiumexplicit relation

Qdrant is a high-performance vector similarity search engine and database written in Rust. Designed for production-grade AI applications with advanced filtering, payload indexing, and distributed deployment. Supports billion-scale vector collections with sub-second query times. Popular choice for RAG, recommendation systems, and anomaly detection.

Qdrant is open-source (Apache 2.0) and offers a free 1GB RAM managed cloud tier ($0). Production cloud clusters use usage-based resource pricing (typically starting under $15/month for basic capacity), alongside Premium and Hybrid Cloud plans for enterprise deployments.Review →

Open-source SurrealDB alternatives

Milvus, Weaviate, Qdrant — see all open-source developer tools.

Free SurrealDB alternatives

Milvus, Weaviate, Qdrant offer a free plan or free tier.

More Databases & ORMs tools

same category, not editor-selected alternatives — see how SurrealDB compares →

UpstashUpstash provides serverless Redis, Kafka, and vector database services with per-request pricing and zero operational overhead. Redis supports global replication for edge computing. Kafka offers pay-per-message event streaming. QStash provides HTTP-based message queues for serverless. Features REST APIs alongside native protocols, ideal for edge and serverless deployments. Integrates with Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, and AWS Lambda natively.TurboVecHigh-performance Rust and Python vector search index utilizing TurboQuant 2-to-4-bit data-oblivious quantization for ultra-compact memory footprint and zero-training ANN retrieval.NeonServerless Postgres platform separating storage and compute for branching, autoscaling, read replicas, instant restore, and scale-to-zero workloads. Neon works with standard PostgreSQL clients and ORMs, supports extensions such as pgvector, and sits inside a broader Neon backend platform with Auth, Data API, Functions, Object Storage, and AI Gateway features.SPTAGMicrosoft's distributed approximate nearest neighbor search library and online vector serving engine, utilizing space-partition trees and relative neighborhood graphs for billion-scale semantic retrieval.SupabaseOpen-source Firebase alternative providing a full backend-as-a-service on PostgreSQL. Auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs from your schema, real-time subscriptions, built-in auth with 20+ social providers and Row Level Security, S3-compatible file storage with CDN, and Deno-powered Edge Functions. Visual dashboard with SQL editor and table editor. Supports pgvector for AI apps. Self-hostable or managed with a generous free tier. 75K+ GitHub stars.Drizzle ORMLightweight, serverless-ready TypeScript ORM with zero dependencies bringing SQL-like syntax into TypeScript for maximum type-safety. Maps queries closely to raw SQL with full auto-completion and type inference. Features Drizzle Kit for migrations, Drizzle Studio for visual browsing, supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and Turso. Runs on Node.js, Bun, Deno, Cloudflare Workers, and Vercel Edge. 26K+ GitHub stars, growing fast as a Prisma alternative.ObjectBoxHigh-performance on-device object and vector database designed for mobile, IoT, and edge applications, providing sub-millisecond local HNSW vector search and optional cloud-optional data synchronization.PineconePinecone is a leading managed vector database designed for high-performance similarity search at scale. Purpose-built for AI applications including RAG, recommendation systems, and semantic search. Offers managed serverless infrastructure with automatic scaling, filtering, hybrid retrieval, and namespacing. No infrastructure management required.HelixDBHelixDB is an open-source, unified graph-vector database engineered in Rust that merges relational, graph, and vector workloads into a single OLTP engine, using LMDB local caching and S3 object storage for scalable agent memory.

SurrealDB head-to-head

SurrealDB vs Milvus — Multi-Model Database vs Dedicated Vector Search Engine →

FAQ

Which SurrealDB alternative is listed first?

Milvus is first in the editor-selected list of 3 SurrealDB alternatives and carries an editorial review score of 84/100. The stored order is editorial; review scores do not determine membership or position.

Are there open-source SurrealDB alternatives?

Yes — Milvus, Weaviate, Qdrant are open source.

Are there free SurrealDB alternatives?

Yes — Milvus, Weaviate, Qdrant offer a free plan or free tier.