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Milvus vs Qdrant

A side-by-side comparison of Milvus and Qdrant, two Vector DB tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.

Compared from listings verified as of

Milvus

Vector DB

Distributed vector database built for billion-scale search.

View Milvus

Qdrant

Vector DB

Open-source, Rust-based vector DB. Fast, predictable, self-hostable.

View Qdrant

At a glance

Feature comparison of Milvus and Qdrant
AttributeMilvusQdrant
CategoryVector DBVector DB
PricingFREEMIUMFREEMIUM
LicenseOpen coreOpen core
DeploymentHybridHybrid
PlatformsAPIAPI
Model supportModel-agnosticModel-agnostic
Vendor (differs)ZillizQdrant

The honest brief

Milvus

Storage/compute split plus DiskANN make it the most robust open-source choice at billion-vector scale.

  • Scales to billion-vector deployments
  • Storage/compute separation
  • Many index types (HNSW, IVF, DiskANN) + GPU
  • Mature project with a large community
  • Operationally heavy to self-host
  • Overkill for small workloads
  • Performance hinges on data quality
  • Higher latency than Qdrant at p50

Qdrant

Rust single-binary you can self-host, with payload filtering strong enough that teams pick it for metadata-heavy search.

  • Open source, written in Rust
  • Self-host or managed cloud
  • Strong payload/metadata filtering
  • Predictable latency at scale
  • More ops than fully-managed rivals
  • Smaller ecosystem than Pinecone
  • Advanced features lean on managed cloud