Milvus vs Zilliz Cloud
A side-by-side comparison of Milvus and Zilliz Cloud, two Vector DB tools, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
Zilliz Cloud
Vector DBFully managed vector database service built on open-source Milvus.
View Zilliz CloudAt a glance
| Attribute | Milvus | Zilliz Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Vector DB | Vector DB |
| Pricing | FREEMIUM | FREEMIUM |
| License (differs) | Open core | Proprietary |
| Deployment (differs) | Hybrid | Cloud |
| Platforms (differs) | API | Web, API |
| Model support (differs) | Model-agnostic | — |
| Vendor | Zilliz | Zilliz |
| Capabilities (differs) |
|
|
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
Zilliz Cloud
Managed Milvus from its original creators, with GPU-accelerated indexing, tiered storage, and hybrid dense/sparse search built in.
- Built by Milvus's original creators
- Free serverless tier, no card required
- Scales to billions of vectors
- Auto-scaling with dedicated clusters
- Multi-cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- The managed service itself is proprietary
- Costs grow with compute and scale
- Vector DB only, not a full RAG stack
When to pick which
Across the signals we compare, Milvus and Zilliz Cloud differ on license, deployment, and platforms:
- License
- Open core · Proprietary
- Deployment
- Hybrid · Cloud
- Platforms
- API · Web, API
Their capability lists differ in recorded depth — compare the full lists above before deciding.