Embedding Models Compared (OpenAI vs Cohere vs OSS)
Benchmark OpenAI vs Cohere Embed vs open-source BGE/E5: dimensions, cost, and MTEB scores.
Why Compare?
OpenAI is not the only game in town. Cohere, Voyage, Google, and many OSS models offer competitive embeddings — sometimes cheaper, more multilingual, or specialized for code.
The right choice depends on use case.
OpenAI text-embedding-3
The default for most teams:
- + Strong English quality
- + Cheap ($0.02 / 1M tokens for small)
- + Up to 3072 dim with Matryoshka
- - Cloud-only
All lessons in this course
- What Embeddings Are (Vector Representations)
- Generating Embeddings with text-embedding-3
- Cosine Similarity for Retrieval
- Embedding Models Compared (OpenAI vs Cohere vs OSS)