Meta SONAR

May 2021
Meta SONAR
Compare in
on
self-host onlyprice
71.5MTEB English v2
May 2021released
1K tokensMax input

Rankingconfiguration unstated?

Full ranking →
1Gemini Embedding 2 Preview95.82Jina Embeddings v5 Omni Small862Jina Embeddings v5 Text Small864Jina Embeddings v5 Omni Nano864Jina Embeddings v5 Text Nano86
···
44BidirLM 1B Embedding70.345Meta SONAR70.246Stella En 1.5B v570.1

Run it yourself

Fits onhardware needs not verified yet
LicenceMITfree for commercial use

Benchmarks

in Embeddings & Retrieval
BEIR · Mean over tasks · English13.5#186
BEIR · Mean over task types · English13.5#186
BEIR · Retrieval · English13.5#186
MTEB Mandarin Chinese v1 · Retrieval · Mandarin Chinese7.1#83
MTEB Mandarin Chinese v1 · STS · Mandarin Chinese34.1#73
MTEB Mandarin Chinese v1 · Reranking · Mandarin Chinese32.8#74
MTEB Mandarin Chinese v1 · Clustering · Mandarin Chinese34.4#70
MTEB Mandarin Chinese v1 · Pair Classification · Mandarin Chinese56.8#73
MTEB German v1 · Clustering · German22.7#100
MTEB Polish v1 · Pair Classification · Polish73.2#69
MTEB Polish v1 · STS · Polish58#60
MTEB Medical v1 · Reranking · Mandarin Chinese35.9#108
MTEB Scandinavian v1 · Bitext Mining · multilingual (3 languages)70.2#45

FAQ

How much does Meta SONAR cost?›

There is no per-unit API price: self-host only.

Is Meta SONAR free to use?›

There is no free API. The weights are open, so you can run it yourself.

How good is Meta SONAR, and what is it best at?›

#224 of 238 in Embeddings.

Is Meta SONAR better than BidirLM 1B Embedding?›

On MTEB Scandinavian v1 · Bitext Mining · multilingual (3 languages), Meta SONAR scores 70.2 vs 70.3 — about the same.

When was Meta SONAR released? Is there a newer version?›

Released 2021-05-21. It is the current version in its line.

Is Meta SONAR open source?›

Yes, the weights are open (MIT licence).

Can I run Meta SONAR locally?›

The weights are open and can be self-hosted; hardware needs are not confirmed yet.

What is Meta SONAR?›

Meta SONAR is an open-weights embeddings & retrieval model from Meta, released May 2021.

What are the best alternatives to Meta SONAR?›

Qwen 3 Embedding 8B (better), Jina Embeddings v5 Text Small (open weights).