turbopuffer
activeby turbopuffer Inc. · since 2023 · also known as tpuf
Serverless vector and full-text search on object storage, priced for billions of documents.
Overview
turbopuffer is a proprietary serverless search engine that stores every namespace on object storage and caches hot data on NVMe and in memory, so cold data costs object-storage prices while warm queries stay fast. It provides vector (ANN), BM25 full-text and hybrid search with attribute filtering, strongly consistent reads by default and namespaces suited to one-per-tenant designs. It became popular with AI companies that index huge numbers of small corpora, such as code-editor and workspace products. Expect higher cold-query latency than RAM-resident engines and plan minimums from $16 per month.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- +Object-storage-first design makes large, mostly-cold datasets cheap
- +Vector, BM25 and hybrid search with filters in one API
- +Strongly consistent reads by default
- +Namespaces scale to millions of tenants
- +No clusters to size or operate
Trade-offs
- −Closed source, cloud-only (BYOC only on Enterprise)
- −Cold namespace queries are noticeably slower than warm ones
- −No free tier
- −Narrower query features than a full search engine
Great for
- +Per-user or per-repo indexes for AI coding and productivity tools
- +RAG over billions of chunks
- +Hybrid search for multi-tenant SaaS
Think twice for
- −Self-hosted or air-gapped environments
- −Consistently ultra-low-latency queries on cold data
- −Analytics and aggregations
Capabilities
Native or official first-party support · 6 of 25 tracked
Scale & consistency
- Comfortable data size
- Large · ≤ 1 PB
- Horizontal scaling
- Native
- Multi-region
- No
- Transactions
- Limited ACID
- Consistency
- Strong, Eventual
- Schema
- Flexible
- Architecture
- Serverless, Shared storage, Distributed
- Query languages
- turbopuffer query API (JSON)
Namespaces on object storage scale to very large document counts; customers run millions of namespaces.
Deployment
available on · AWS · Google Cloud
Ecosystem
Alternatives to turbopuffer
Fully managed serverless vector database with built-in embedding, reranking and assistants.
turbopuffer vs pinecone →Embedded, serverless retrieval database on the Lance columnar format for multimodal AI data.
turbopuffer vs lancedb →Vector storage and similarity queries built into S3, trading latency for very low cost at scale.
turbopuffer vs amazon-s3-vectors →Rust vector search engine with rich payload filtering, quantization and a managed cloud.
turbopuffer vs qdrant →Open-source retrieval database for AI apps, from embedded Python to serverless Chroma Cloud.
turbopuffer vs chroma →Fully managed Milvus from its creators, with serverless, dedicated and BYOC deployments.
turbopuffer vs zilliz-cloud →turbopuffer FAQ
What is turbopuffer?
turbopuffer is a vector database by turbopuffer Inc., first released in 2023. turbopuffer is a proprietary serverless search engine that stores every namespace on object storage and caches hot data on NVMe and in memory, so cold data costs object-storage prices while warm queries stay fast. It provides vector (ANN), BM25 full-text and hybrid search with attribute filtering, strongly consistent reads by default and namespaces suited to one-per-tenant designs. It became popular with AI companies that index huge numbers of small corpora, such as code-editor and workspace products. Expect higher cold-query latency than RAM-resident engines and plan minimums from $16 per month.
Is turbopuffer open source?
No. turbopuffer is proprietary, closed-source software.
Does turbopuffer support ACID transactions?
Partly. turbopuffer offers limited ACID guarantees (for example, single-record or single-partition transactions), with strong, eventual consistency.
Does turbopuffer scale horizontally?
turbopuffer scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at large scale (≤ 1 PB).
How can I run turbopuffer?
You can use the vendor's managed cloud and run it serverless. It is available on AWS and Google Cloud.
What is turbopuffer best for?
turbopuffer is a strong fit for per-user or per-repo indexes for AI coding and productivity tools; RAG over billions of chunks; and hybrid search for multi-tenant SaaS. Think twice for self-hosted or air-gapped environments.
What are the best alternatives to turbopuffer?
Common alternatives to turbopuffer include Pinecone, LanceDB, Amazon S3 Vectors, Qdrant and Chroma. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.
How popular is turbopuffer?
turbopuffer ranks #112 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (26.5/100), and #9 among vector databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.