Wax
A sub-millisecond on-device RAG memory library for iOS and macOS AI agents, implemented in pure Swift with hybrid BM25 + HNSW vector search, local MiniLM embeddings, Metal GPU acceleration, token budgeting, and a single portable .wax file format — no server or API required.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Build/scripting tool. Local execution. Build scripts can execute arbitrary code — review before running. Supply chain security for build dependencies.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You are building a native iOS or macOS app that needs fast, private, on-device memory/RAG without any network calls or server infrastructure.
Avoid When
You need a cross-platform, server-hosted, or cloud-scalable vector database — use Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, or Chroma instead.
Use Cases
- • Persistent, searchable memory for iOS and macOS AI agent apps without cloud dependencies
- • Privacy-first RAG where all embeddings and retrieval happen on-device
- • Token-budget-aware context compression for constrained LLM context windows
- • Embedding Apple Silicon GPU acceleration into Swift AI applications via Metal
Not For
- • Cross-platform or server-side RAG systems (Swift/Apple platform only)
- • Large-scale document corpora exceeding single-device storage
- • Teams not working in Swift or the Apple ecosystem
Interface
Authentication
No authentication required; entirely on-device, no external services.
Pricing
Apache 2.0 licensed. Zero runtime costs — all computation is local.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Requires Swift 6.2+ and Xcode 16.0+ — not compatible with older toolchains
- ⚠ Apple Silicon recommended; Intel Macs fall back to CPU inference with higher latency
- ⚠ MCP server installed via npx waxmcp — Node.js required even for the Swift library MCP wrapper
- ⚠ Foundation Models integration requires iOS 26+ (future OS version)
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Wax.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.