Quickwit vs Vald
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted search engines options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Quickwit
Cloud-native search engine for logs and traces
VS
Vald
Cloud-native distributed vector search engine
| Feature | Quickwit | Vald |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 93 · Excellent | 85 · Excellent |
| Category | Search Engines | Search Engines |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Rust | Go |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 1,024 MB | 2,048 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, binary | kubernetes, helm, docker |
| GitHub stars | ★ 11,670 | ★ 1,730 |
| First released | 2021 | 2020 |
| Replaces | Splunk, Elasticsearch | Pinecone, Elasticsearch |
What are Quickwit and Vald?
Quickwit
Quickwit is an open-source, cloud-native search engine optimized for log management, distributed tracing and analytics on large datasets stored in object storage. It is designed to be cost efficient at scale.
- Search directly on object storage
- Optimized for logs and traces
- Decoupled compute and storage
- Elasticsearch-compatible API
Vald
Vald is a highly scalable distributed vector search engine designed to run on Kubernetes for approximate nearest neighbor search over billions of vectors. It is used for similarity search in recommendation and AI applications.
- Distributed vector search
- Kubernetes-native
- Billion-scale indexes
- Approximate nearest neighbor
Quickwit vs Vald: key differences
Quickwit is written in Rust, while Vald is built with Go. Quickwit is the lighter option, starting around 1,024 MB of RAM against 2,048 MB for Vald. Quickwit has the considerably larger community, at 11,670 GitHub stars versus 1,730.
Why pick each one
Choose Quickwit if…
- Very cost effective at scale
- Modern Rust codebase
Watch out for
- Focused on append-only data
Choose Vald if…
- Released under the Apache-2.0 license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Kubernetes-ready with Helm charts available
- Active community (1.7k GitHub stars)
Frequently asked questions
Is Quickwit or Vald better?
Quickwit is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Vald if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Quickwit and Vald free and open-source?
Yes. Quickwit is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Vald under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Quickwit and Vald with Docker?
Quickwit: yes. Vald: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Quickwit or Vald?
Quickwit has the smaller minimum footprint at 1,024 MB of RAM, compared to about 2,048 MB for Vald. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.