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Weaviate vs Zilliz Cloud

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

Compared from listings verified as of

Weaviate

Vector DB

Open-source vector database with built-in vectorisers.

View Weaviate

Zilliz Cloud

Vector DB

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

View Zilliz Cloud

At a glance

Feature comparison of Weaviate and Zilliz Cloud
AttributeWeaviateZilliz Cloud
CategoryVector DBVector DB
PricingFREEMIUMFREEMIUM
License (differs)Open coreProprietary
Deployment (differs)HybridCloud
Platforms (differs)APIWeb, API
Model support (differs)Model-agnostic—
Vendor (differs)WeaviateZilliz

The honest brief

Weaviate

Built-in vectorizer modules embed text inline — raw text in, vectors out — so you skip running a separate embedding pipeline.

  • Hybrid BM25 + vector search
  • Self-hostable or managed cloud
  • GraphQL and REST APIs
  • Resource-heavy at large scale
  • Module config has a learning curve
  • Managed tier costs add up
  • Newer than some lexical engines

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
Weaviate detailsZilliz Cloud detailsAll Vector DB apps