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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

Milvus

Vector DB

Distributed vector database built for billion-scale search.

View Milvus

Zilliz Cloud

Vector DB

Fully managed vector database service built on open-source Milvus.

View Zilliz Cloud

At a glance

Feature comparison of Milvus and Zilliz Cloud
AttributeMilvusZilliz Cloud
CategoryVector DBVector DB
PricingFREEMIUMFREEMIUM
License (differs)Open coreProprietary
Deployment (differs)HybridCloud
Platforms (differs)APIWeb, API
Model support (differs)Model-agnostic—
VendorZillizZilliz

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
Milvus detailsZilliz Cloud detailsAll Vector DB apps