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Milvus

Free tier

The High-Performance Vector Database Built for Scale

Free tier available·All audiences·API available·Open source
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Key strengths

High-performance vector similarity searchHorizontal scalability to tens of billions of vectorsOpen-source with Apache 2.0 licenseMultiple deployment options (Lite, Standalone, Distributed, Managed Cloud)Metadata filtering, hybrid search, multi-vector supportActive community and extensive ecosystem tooling
Free tier + paid plans
Founded 2019
Self-hostable
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Milvus — Technical Overview

Milvus is an open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed vector database purpose-built for high-performance similarity search at massive scale. First released in 2019, it is designed to store, index, and query dense and sparse vector embeddings across datasets reaching tens of billions of vectors.

Architecture & Deployment Modes Milvus offers four deployment configurations to match workload requirements:

  • Milvus Lite — lightweight, embedded mode for local development and prototyping
  • Standalone — single-node deployment for moderate-scale workloads
  • Distributed — horizontally scalable, cloud-native architecture for production at scale
  • Managed Cloud — fully managed via Zilliz Cloud, available as SaaS or BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud), with serverless and dedicated cluster options

Core Capabilities

  • High-throughput vector similarity search with support for multiple index types
  • Hybrid search combining dense vector search with metadata filtering
  • Multi-vector and multi-modal query support
  • Horizontal scalability to tens of billions of vectors
  • API-first design with a Python SDK installable via pip and additional language client support

Ecosystem & Integrations Milvus integrates with tooling across the MLOps and GenAI stack, including: Attu (GUI admin), Milvus CLI, Milvus Backup, VTS (Vector Transport Service), Deep Searcher, Claude Context, and Zilliz Cloud. It has accumulated 46,318 GitHub stars, reflecting broad community adoption.

Licensing & Pricing Self-hosted deployment is fully free under Apache 2.0. Managed cloud tiers are available through Zilliz Cloud with serverless (pay-as-you-go) and dedicated cluster pricing.