Skip to content
SPECIFICTION
Get listed

Lance

lance.org

Free plan Self-hosted
Visit lance.org
Spec score 7.8 #22 of 36 in Data Version Control Tools

Spec sheet

Purpose
Lance is an open lakehouse format for multimodal AI, built for data on object storage.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Product
Lance is an open source lakehouse format for multimodal AI, with file, table, and catalog specifications for object storage.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Integrations
Documented integrations include DataFusion, Spark, DuckDB, Trino, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ray, Hugging Face, PostgreSQL, and Flink.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Support
The contributor guide directs users with questions to the Lance Discord for real-time support.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
License
The site identifies Lance as open source under the Apache-2.0 license.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Catalogs
Catalog implementations listed include Apache Hive, Apache Polaris, Apache Gravitino, Unity Catalog, and AWS Glue.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Community support
The project links users to Discord and a mailing list for community communication.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Data management
The table format supports ACID transactions, schema evolution, time travel, and incremental updates through MVCC.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Getting started
The quickstart identifies the Python SDK, installed with `pip install pylance`, as the easiest way to start using Lance.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Incubating integrations
The governance page identifies Lance Context, Data Viewer, Flink, Graph, Trino, and pglance as incubating projects whose APIs or functionality may change.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Multimodal data
Lance stores images, videos, audio, text, and embeddings alongside tabular data in one format.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Notable limit
The current unstable Lance 2.3 file format has no compatibility guarantee and the documentation says it should not be used in production.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Python SDK
The quickstart identifies pylance as the Python SDK and gives `pip install pylance` as the installation command.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Random access
The site says Lance offers 100× faster random access than Parquet and Iceberg.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Schema evolution
Lance supports adding columns with backfill by writing new Lance files rather than rewriting the full table.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Search
Lance combines vector similarity, BM25 full-text search, and SQL analytics on the same dataset, accelerated by secondary indexes.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Security reporting
The community page asks users to report security vulnerabilities privately to the PMC mailing list and avoid public disclosure until the issue is resolved.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
SQL access
Lance datasets can be queried with SQL through integrations including DataFusion, Spark, DuckDB, and Trino.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Storage
Lance can commit directly to object storage, and its Directory Catalog supports deployments directly on object stores without additional infrastructure.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org
Versioning
The format supports ACID transactions, time travel, and dataset versioning.Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org

Plans and prices

Lance Free Open source · Apache-2.0 Read 8 Oct 2026 · lance.org

Every Lance plan and price →

Where Specifiction places it

Alternatives to LanceAll alternatives →