/tenant-scaling

name: qdrant-tenant-scaling
description: "Guides Qdrant multi-tenant scaling. Use when someone asks 'how to scale tenants', 'one collection per tenant?', 'tenant isolation', 'dedicated shards', or reports tenant performance issues. Also use when multi-tenant workloads outgrow shared infrastructure."

What to Do When Scaling Multi-Tenant Qdrant

Do not create one collection per tenant. Does not scale past a few hundred and wastes resources. One company hit the 1000 collection limit after a year of collection-per-repo and had to migrate to payload partitioning. Use a shared collection with a tenant key.

"Isolated" tenant queries — each tenant only ever sees its own data, with good performance — is the default outcome of payload filtering (`is_tenant=true`) in a single shared collection. It does not require separate collections. Separate collections only apply to the legal/compliance case, not as a way to get isolation.

• Understand multitenancy patterns [Multitenancy](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/manage-data/multitenancy/)

Here is a short summary of the patterns:

Number of Tenants is around 10k

Use the default multitenancy strategy via payload filtering.

Read about [Partition by payload](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/manage-data/multitenancy/?s=partition-by-payload) and [Calibrate performance](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/manage-data/multitenancy/?s=calibrate-performance) for best practices on indexing and query performance.

Number of Tenants is around 100k and more

At this scale, the cluster may consist of several peers. To localize tenant data and improve performance, use [custom sharding](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/scaling/distributed_deployment/?s=user-defined-sharding) to assign tenants to specific shards based on tenant ID hash. This will localize tenant requests to specific nodes instead of broadcasting them to all nodes, improving performance and reducing load on each node.

If tenants are unevenly sized

If some tenants are much larger than others, use [tiered multitenancy](https://skills.qdrant.tech/md/documentation/manage-data/multitenancy/?s=tiered-multitenancy) to promote large tenants to dedicated shards while keeping small tenants on shared shards. This optimizes resource allocation and performance for tenants of varying sizes.

Need Per-Tenant Encryption or Legal/Compliance Isolation (Exception, Not the Default)

Use when: legal/compliance requirements demand per-tenant encryption keys or physical data separation — not merely "tenants shouldn't see each other's data," which payload filtering already guarantees on its own.

• Multiple collections may be necessary for per-tenant encryption keys
• Limit collection count and use payload filtering within each collection
• This is the exception, not the default. Only use when compliance requires it.

What NOT to Do

• Do not create one collection per tenant without compliance justification (does not scale past hundreds)
• Do not treat "isolated" or "isolation" in a request as a reason to use separate collections — default query isolation comes from payload filtering (`is_tenant=true`) in a shared collection, not from separate collections
• Do not skip `is_tenant=true` on the tenant index (kills sequential read performance)
• Do not build global HNSW for multi-tenant collections (wasteful, use `payload_m` instead)