Weaviate

Weaviate is the second vector database in this category, and the honest way to frame it against Qdrant is deployment breadth rather than a clear winner: Weaviate Cloud runs across AWS, GCP and Azure globally, including European regions, with a free tier capped at 100,000 objects, a pay-as-you-go Flex plan from about $45 a month, and a prepaid Premium plan from about $400 a month for dedicated or larger shared deployments.

The engine itself is open source under a BSD licence and supports hybrid search that combines vector similarity with traditional keyword matching in one query.

Weaviate B.V. is registered in Amsterdam, which is the reason to reach for it specifically when the rest of a team's infrastructure is already Dutch or EU-based and the vendor's own data-processing terms should sit under the same jurisdiction.

Against Qdrant, Weaviate's multi-cloud reach is an advantage when the application already lives on a specific hyperscaler region; Qdrant's German entity and stated SOC 2 and HIPAA certification are the sharper answer when a compliance questionnaire is the actual blocker. Neither displaces the general-purpose databases already in this category — both solve a narrower, specific problem.

What Weaviate does well

• Open-source core (BSD-licensed) with hybrid vector + keyword search
• Deploys across AWS, GCP and Azure, including EU regions
• Free tier with no credit card required
• Dutch company, EU jurisdiction
• Pay-as-you-go Flex plan for smaller workloads

Where Weaviate falls short

• Single-purpose vector database, not a general-purpose store
• No certification stated on its own pages
• Premium plan is a prepaid contract from about $400/month
• Smaller free tier than a self-hosted single-node Qdrant instance

Standout feature. Multi-cloud reach across AWS, GCP and Azure, from a Dutch-registered company, for the same AI-search workload Qdrant serves from Germany.