Milvus review 2026: open-source vector database features, Zilliz Cloud pricing, RAG and AI search use cases, and how it compares to Pinecone and Weaviate.
Milvus is an open-source, distributed vector database built to store and search billions of high-dimensional embedding vectors, the numerical representations that power modern AI applications like semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Zilliz, the company that started building Milvus in 2018, open-sourced it in 2019 and donated it to the Linux Foundation's LF AI and Data Foundation in 2020, making it a vendor-neutral open-source project.
Zilliz was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California; it has raised roughly $113 million in funding, including a $43 million Series B in 2020 and a $60 million round in 2022, and continues to lead Milvus's open-source development while selling a managed cloud version called Zilliz Cloud.
Milvus supports multiple approximate-nearest-neighbor indexing algorithms, including HNSW, IVF, and DiskANN, and can combine vector similarity search with traditional metadata filtering for hybrid search. It is cloud-native and horizontally scalable, separating storage from compute so it can grow to handle billions of vectors in production.
Deployment options range from Milvus Lite, an embedded version that runs inside a Python process for local development, to a standalone Docker deployment for small workloads, up to a fully distributed Kubernetes-based cluster for large-scale production use. It integrates directly with popular AI frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Hugging Face.
The open-source, self-hosted version of Milvus is completely free under the Apache 2.0 license, with no usage limits beyond what a company's own infrastructure can support. This makes it a common choice for teams that want full control over their vector search infrastructure and data.
Zilliz Cloud, the managed hosting option, offers a free tier with roughly 5GB of storage and 2.5 million vCUs per month, a pay-as-you-go Serverless tier priced around $4 per million vCUs, and Dedicated cluster tiers starting around $99/month for teams that want guaranteed, isolated compute resources without operating Milvus themselves.
Yes, the open-source, self-hosted version is completely free under the Apache 2.0 license.
Zilliz, a company founded in 2017 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, started developing Milvus in 2018 and open-sourced it in 2019.
A fully managed, hosted version of Milvus offered by Zilliz, with free, serverless, and dedicated pricing tiers.
Semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for LLMs, recommendation systems, and image or video similarity search.
Milvus's distributed cluster architecture is designed to handle billions of vectors in production.
No, Milvus was donated to the Linux Foundation's LF AI and Data Foundation in 2020, making it a vendor-neutral open-source project.