What is Infinity used for?

Infinity is an AI-native database from Infiniflow offering fast hybrid search over dense vectors, sparse vectors, tensors and full-text for LLM applications. It is a good fit for RAG and semantic search backends, recommendation systems, and question-answering over documents.

Is Infinity open source?

Yes. Infinity is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at infiniflow/infinity and is written mainly in C++.

Yes. Infinity is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Infinity?

Yes. Infinity can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Infinity an alternative to?

Infinity is an open-source alternative to Pinecone and Elastic. Other open-source alternatives to Pinecone include Vespa, Epsilla VectorDB and MyScaleDB.

Is Infinity actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Infinity was on 23 September 2026, and the latest release is v0.7.3, published on 6 August 2026. The project has 4.7k stars on GitHub.

Infinity: open-source alternative to Pinecone, Elastic

About Infinity

Infinity is a database built for LLM applications that combines several kinds of retrieval in one engine. It handles searches over dense vectors, sparse vectors, multi-vector tensors and full text, in addition to structured data, so retrieval-augmented generation pipelines do not need to join results from separate systems.

The README lists search, recommenders, question answering, conversational AI, copilots and content generation among its targets. Repository topics mention approximate nearest neighbor search, HNSW, BM25 and hybrid search, and the engine is written in C++ using C++20 modules. The project provides benchmarks, documentation and a roadmap, with community links on Discord and Twitter.

Infinity is licensed under Apache-2.0 and is run on your own servers. It suits developers building RAG and semantic search systems who want a single database for vector, keyword and multi-vector retrieval.

Key features

Dense and sparse vector search
Tensor multi-vector retrieval
BM25 full-text search
Hybrid search across data types
Support for RAG pipelines
C++20 high-performance engine

Good fit for

→RAG and semantic search backends
→Recommendation systems
→Question-answering over documents

Built with: C++
Tags: vector-database; hybrid-search; rag; full-text-search; llm; bm25; cpp; ai-native

Infinity: questions and answers

What is Infinity used for?: Infinity is an AI-native database from Infiniflow offering fast hybrid search over dense vectors, sparse vectors, tensors and full-text for LLM applications. It is a good fit for RAG and semantic search backends, recommendation systems, and question-answering over documents.
Is Infinity open source?: Yes. Infinity is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at infiniflow/infinity and is written mainly in C++.
Is Infinity free?: Yes. Infinity is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Infinity?: Yes. Infinity can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Infinity an alternative to?: Infinity is an open-source alternative to Pinecone and Elastic. Other open-source alternatives to Pinecone include Vespa, Epsilla VectorDB and MyScaleDB.
Is Infinity actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Infinity was on 23 September 2026, and the latest release is v0.7.3, published on 6 August 2026. The project has 4.7k stars on GitHub.