GalaxDB vs Selvedge

GalaxDB and Selvedge are both inference engines & infra tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

GalaxDB

The core bet is that keeping structured rows, dense embeddings, JSON, blobs, and training snapshots in one storage engine eliminates the synchronization failures that happen when each lives somewhere else. You declare an EMBEDDING MODEL in your DDL and every INSERT triggers a local sidecar that computes and indexes the vector — no Airflow, no Lambda, no external API call. Time-travel lets you tag a snapshot before a training run and replay the exact data the model saw months later, which means reproducibility stops being a manual discipline. The ceiling appears at scale: v1.0-beta.1 benchmarks are real but the project is pre-GA, and teams running serious production traffic will be betting on a single vendor with no public track record at that load. If your stack already runs on managed Postgres and a mature vector service, the migration cost has to pencil out against the consolidation savings.

Selvedge

Selvedge is a local MCP server that AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) call as they work, logging the reasoning behind every change into a SQLite file that lives next to your code under .selvedge/. Queries are entity-scoped — you ask about users.email or deps/stripe, not line numbers — so the answer surfaces in the same terms you search in. The vendor describes zero telemetry, no accounts, and no external servers; everything stays on disk. The wall appears when your team needs cross-repo provenance or wants to pipe this data into an existing observability stack — Selvedge emits records but does not integrate with those systems out of the box.

Attribute	GalaxDB	Selvedge
Pricing	Free	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Linux, self-hosted binary, Python library	Linux, macOS, Windows (via Python)
Released	2025	2026-05
Pros	Auto-embedding on INSERT via DDL annotation, so you eliminate the Airflow or Lambda pipeline that otherwise becomes a second system to monitor and debug. SEMANTIC_MATCH runs inside a standard SQL WHERE clause combined with filters and ORDER BY in one query plan, so you avoid the client-side merge code that breaks when result sets don't line up. CREATE VERSION TAG pins database state before a training run, so reproducing a model result or debugging a regression six months later is a SQL query rather than an archaeology project. Local embedding inference with sentence-transformers runs entirely inside the binary, so teams with data residency requirements or OpenAI API cost concerns get semantic search without any external call. The single binary ships with transactional rows, vector index, blob storage, and versioning in one process, so an early-stage AI app avoids accumulating five separate infrastructure bills before hitting meaningful traffic.	Reasoning is captured in the same context window that produced the change — not reconstructed from the diff afterward — which means the intent survives even when the original prompt, the developer who wrote it, and the model version are all gone. Entity-scoped queries (selvedge blame payments.amount, selvedge diff users --since 30d) let you ask about the things you actually search for rather than hunting through line-level history, so a schema audit that would take an afternoon takes a single command. Fully local storage in a SQLite file with no accounts, no telemetry, and no external servers, which means sensitive schema and API change history never leaves the machine — a hard requirement in compliance-heavy environments. Provider-agnostic MCP integration wires into Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot through a single setup command, so teams already using any of those agents get provenance logging without changing their workflow. Full-text search across all logged events (selvedge search "stripe") and changeset grouping (selvedge changeset add-stripe-billing) mean you can reconstruct the full scope of a feature build after the fact, which is the audit trail that git log alone cannot provide.
Cons	The Cloud managed offering is on a waitlist with no committed GA date per the vendor page — teams that need a managed deployment path rather than self-hosted ops cannot depend on this for a production timeline. Beta-stage software at v1.0-beta.1 carries real schema and API change risk; teams building on top of it before a stable release are absorbing migration work that is not yet scoped, which makes it unsuitable as a load-bearing dependency in a production system with defined SLAs. There is no public track record of GalaxDB under high-concurrency production workloads beyond the vendor-reported benchmarks — teams whose existing PostgreSQL and Pinecone setup is already tuned and monitored will find no migration path that doesn't require rebuilding operational confidence from scratch, and at that point most teams stay on the proven stack rather than consolidate.	Selvedge has no API and no export integration — teams that need to push reasoning records into an existing compliance platform, a data warehouse, or a centralized observability system must write their own pipeline against the SQLite file, adding a maintenance surface that grows with audit requirements. The store is scoped to a single local project directory; teams running multi-repo codebases where an agent change in one repo depends on a change in another get no cross-repo provenance, and at that point teams managing compliance across repositories will move to a dedicated audit-log solution that operates at the organization level. Selvedge only captures what the agent explicitly logs through the MCP tool call — if an agent skips the log_change call, makes changes outside a supported tool, or the MCP connection drops mid-session, that change has no recorded reasoning and the gap is invisible in the history.

Bottom line

Selvedge is open source. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between GalaxDB and Selvedge?

GalaxDB is Free, while Selvedge is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is GalaxDB better than Selvedge?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.