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Milvus vs Vespa

A side-by-side comparison of Milvus and Vespa, 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

Vespa

Vector DB

Open-source serving engine for vector, lexical, and structured search at scale.

View Vespa

At a glance

Feature comparison of Milvus and Vespa
AttributeMilvusVespa
CategoryVector DBVector DB
PricingFREEMIUMFREEMIUM
LicenseOpen coreOpen core
DeploymentHybridHybrid
Platforms (differs)APIAPI, CLI, Linux
Model supportModel-agnosticModel-agnostic
Vendor (differs)ZillizVespa.ai

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

Vespa

Combines vector, lexical and structured search plus ML inference in one query, distributed across nodes at web scale.

  • Vector + lexical + structured in one query
  • Battle-tested at Yahoo scale
  • Apache-2.0, fully self-hostable
  • In-engine ML model inference
  • Vespa Cloud Enclave runs in your VPC
  • Steep learning curve
  • Operationally heavy to self-host
  • Overkill for simple vector search
  • Smaller community than Elastic
Milvus detailsVespa detailsAll Vector DB apps