The best embedding models in 2026
The best embedding models right now are Voyage rerank-3, voyage-4-large and Cohere Rerank 5, out of 17 we have reviewed. Each is ranked by our rating, with its price, our verdict and who it suits.
Updated Oct 23, 2026 · Ranked from our reviews · How we review
- 1
On Voyage's own numbers rerank-3 leads every hosted rival, and the lite model costs so little that the rate limit, not the bill, decides how much reranking you do.
Best for: Teams running RAG or search in production who want the best hosted reranking quality for the money.
Price: rerank-3 $0.05 per 1M tokens; rerank-3-lite $0.02 per 1M tokens; first 200M tokens free.
Read our Voyage rerank-3 review4.6/5 - 2
A strong retrieval model with one trick rivals lack, a shared vector space, but its lead rests on Voyage's own tests and it may train on your data until an admin opts out.
Best for: Teams building text search or RAG who want to pay for quality at index time and run cheap or local query embeddings.
Price: $0.12 per 1M tokens; first 200M tokens free (not on Batch); Batch API 33% off.
Read our voyage-4-large review4.5/5 - 3
Rerank 5 makes reranking cheap enough to stop rationing and calibrated enough to trust a threshold, though every benchmark behind it so far is Cohere's own.
Best for: Teams running production RAG or enterprise search who want a hosted reranker with dependable score thresholds and private-deployment options.
Price: Pro $0.05 and Fast $0.02 per million tokens on Cohere's API. Model Vault dedicated instance $4.00/hour ($2,500/month) for either size.
Read our Cohere Rerank 5 review4.4/5 - 4
EmbeddingGemma 2 makes private, offline search across photos, voice notes and code practical on a phone, while leaving text-only retrieval quality almost exactly where version one left it.
Best for: Mobile and edge developers building private or offline search across text, code, images and audio.
Price: Free under Apache 2.0, subject to the Gemma Prohibited Use Policy. No hosted API from Google or Hugging Face inference providers yet.
Read our EmbeddingGemma 2 review4.3/5 - 5
Gemini Embedding 2 is the simplest way to search video and audio with a sentence, and an overpriced way to search plain text.
Best for: Developers building search or recommendations across mixed media such as images, recordings and video.
Price: Per 1M tokens: text $0.20, image $0.45, audio $6.50, video $12; Batch half price; free tier with limits (inputs used for product improvement).
Read our Gemini Embedding 2 review4.3/5 - 6
Jina v5's shared text-and-media vector space is the cleverest idea in small embeddings, and a non-commercial licence is the toll for anyone who wants to run it themselves.
Best for: Teams building multilingual or multimodal search on small models, especially inside Elastic.
Price: Jina API: small models $0.05 per 1M tokens, nano $0.02. Weights free for non-commercial use; commercial self-hosting needs a paid Elastic licence.
Read our Jina Embeddings v5 review4.3/5 - 7
A 0.6B reranker that beats a 4B one on BEIR, held back by a licence that turns self-hosting into a sales call.
Best for: Elastic users and teams that want a small, long-context reranker on their own hardware.
Price: Jina API $0.05 per 1M tokens. Weights free for non-commercial use; commercial self-hosting needs a paid Elastic licence.
Read our Jina Reranker v3.5 review4.3/5 - 8
The open embedder to start with when one index has to hold slides, screenshots and video alongside text, with Apache 2.0 settling the licence question.
Best for: Teams self-hosting search across images, video and mixed documents under a permissive licence.
Price: Free under Apache 2.0.
Read our Qwen3-VL-Embedding review4.3/5 - 9
Built for long, visually messy business documents and now priced in the open, though every benchmark that flatters it is Cohere's own.
Best for: Enterprises indexing long PDFs, filings and slide decks with mixed text and images.
Price: API: Pro $0.12 and Fast $0.08 per 1M text tokens; images $0.40 per 1M. Model Vault from $3/hour or $2,000/month per instance.
Read our Cohere Embed 5 review4.2/5 - 10
A complete open search stack under one licence, embedder and reranker together, though its leaderboard crown dates from June 2025.
Best for: Teams self-hosting multilingual or code search who want both embedding and reranking under one open licence.
Price: Free under Apache 2.0. Qwen Cloud's hosted text-embedding-v4, built on Qwen3, is $0.07 per 1M tokens.
Read our Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker review4.2/5 - 11
Purpose-built for finding moments in video, with small vectors that keep storage cheap, though every number behind it comes from TwelveLabs.
Best for: Teams building search over large video libraries who want a managed, video-specialist embedding API and will run their own vector store.
Price: Embed API at launch, per 1M tokens: video $0.26, audio $0.065, image $0.08, document $0.162, text $0.20. Plans: Free, Plus $29/month, Pro $99/month, Enterprise custom.
Read our Marengo 3.5 review3.9/5 - 12
A sharp open reranker whose calibrated scores are worth having, now with nobody behind it but your own GPU.
Best for: Teams already running GPU inference who want a free reranker with relevance scores they can use as a cut-off.
Price: Free under Apache 2.0. ZeroEntropy's hosted API ($0.025 per 1M tokens at launch) was supported only until 4 September 2026 and now returns an unavailable error.
Read our zerank-2 review3.9/5 - 13
Still the safest small reranker to self-host on licence alone, though its benchmark lead dates from March 2025.
Best for: Teams that want a small, permissively licensed reranker to run on their own hardware.
Price: Free under Apache 2.0. Hosted only inside Mixedbread Search: semantic search $4 per 1,000 queries, $7.50 with reranking; Scale plan $20/month in credits.
Read our mxbai-rerank v2 review3.8/5 - 14
Accurate enough to be the yardstick for page-image search, and licensed so that a yardstick is all most companies can use it as.
Best for: Researchers and evaluation teams who need a strong open baseline for visual document retrieval and do not plan to ship it.
Price: Free weights for non-commercial and research use (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Read our Nemotron ColEmbed V2 review3.8/5 - 15
Rerank 4 still works, but Cohere's own Rerank 5 now beats it on every benchmark Cohere reports, which makes it a model to migrate from rather than adopt.
Best for: Teams with a tuned Rerank 4 pipeline who need time before re-validating on Rerank 5.
Price: Billed per search (one query, up to 100 documents). Vercel AI Gateway lists Pro at $2.50 and Fast at $2.00 per 1,000 searches; Cohere's page no longer shows Rerank 4 rates.
Read our Cohere Rerank 4 review3.7/5 - 16
Safe, cheap and supported by every vector database, text-embedding-3-large now trails newer retrievers by enough to justify a re-test before any new build.
Best for: Teams already on OpenAI who value one vendor, strict data terms and broad tool support over top retrieval quality.
Price: $0.13 per 1M tokens; Batch half price; text-embedding-3-small $0.02 per 1M.
Read our text-embedding-3-large review3.7/5 - 17
Still the fastest way to get semantic search working, and no longer the right model to ship.
Best for: Learners and prototypers who need a fast, universally supported English embedding model.
Price: Free under Apache 2.0.
Read our all-MiniLM-L6-v2 review3.4/5