multilingual-e5-small vs paraphrase-MiniLM-L6-v2

Specs, VRAM requirements and download trends — updated 6 August 2026.

intfloat · A
Params
120 M
Context
512
30d
15.6 M
mit · commercial OK
sentence-transformers · B
Params
20 M
Context
512
30d
2.8 M
apache-2.0 · commercial OK

Specification comparison

Differences are highlighted; identical values are muted.

Specification multilingual-e5-small paraphrase-MiniLM-L6-v2
Parameters 120 M 20 M
Architecture BertModel BertModel
Context length 512 512
Licence mit apache-2.0
Commercial use Allowed Allowed
Languages 94
Downloads 30d 15,601,118 2,755,573
Downloads all time 94.4 M 158.4 M
Quantizations on the Hub SAFETENSORS SAFETENSORS
Gated No No
First seen on the Hub 2023-06-30 2022-03-02

Download trend

Daily snapshots, last 10 days (28 Jul – 6 Aug)

15.8 M2.5 M
multilingual-e5-small paraphrase-MiniLM-L6-v2

VRAM side by side

On RTX 4090 · 24 GB · 8K context unless noted

paraphrase-MiniLM-L6-v2 · fp16 0.6 GB / 24 GB
✅ Runs comfortably
multilingual-e5-small · fp16 1.0 GB / 24 GB
✅ Runs comfortably

Adjacent comparisons