Milvus
Multi-vector columns (10 simultaneous). Native hybrid search (v2.5). CAGRA + Vamana GPU/CPU (v2.6).
Active · Verified 2026-10-26 · fresh as of 2026-10-26 · 60 cited facts, 10 with a third-party source · 1 recorded change · Suggest a correction
At a glance
- Type
- Multi-vector + hybrid + GPU vendor fix
- Tier
- T1
- Section
- Vector-database infrastructure
- Latest release
- v3.0.3 (2026-10-14) vendor fix
- License
- Apache-2.0 repo fix
- Pricing
- free (OSS); managed via Zilliz Cloud (free tier, then usage-based) third-party fix
- Funding
- $113M total (Zilliz: $43M 2020 + $60M 2022); Zilliz is the commercial entity third-party fix
- Freshness
- 2026-10-26 fix
- Layer
- model-infra repo fix
- Licensing
- open-source repo fix
- SDK languages
- go, java, python, rest, typescript vendor fix
- Protocols
- mcp-server repo fix
- Developer activity
- OpenRank 61.72 (12-mo avg 79.77) · 138 participants — 2026-09 third-party fix
When to use
Optimised for: low-latency similarity search + scale
Anti-fit: not for relational / graph-heavy queries (vector-first by design)
Pros & cons
Pros
Largest-scale OSS vector DB — billions of vectors comfortably; CNCF graduate; strong community in China + research labs.
Cons
Operational complexity is high vs Pinecone-managed; documentation can be uneven across language clients.
Claims & capabilities
40,000+ GitHub★ milestone reinforcing leadership in OSS vector DBs; 10,000+ enterprise deployments (Alibaba, Cisco, BIGO/Likee, Rakuten Symphony); Milvus 2.5 (2025) added native hybrid search; production reports sub-50ms retrieval at billion-vector scale; Zilliz Cloud benchmarks claim 10x faster ANN vs Weaviate at 5B+ vectors with sub-10ms latency
Technical surface
- API surface
- REST, gRPC, SDK: Python, Java, Go, Node.js, C#, Ruby
- Backend storage
- custom (object-storage backed; etcd metadata; Pulsar/Kafka log)
- Deployment
- Both (self-hosted OSS + Zilliz Cloud managed)
- Embedding model
- multiple supported
- Multi-tenancy
- Control plane and data plane in separate VPCs/subnets; BYOC option for hard tenant isolation
- MCP
- yes — official zilliztech/mcp-server-milvus (GitHub)
- A2A
- no Google A2A (Agent2Agent) integration documented as of 2026-05.
- OpenTelemetry
- first-class — Prometheus + OTel
Compare Milvus with…
Alternatives to Milvus → live options ranked by shared design, licence, hosting and MCP support
Similar systems
Other vector-database infrastructure in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
- Qdrant T1
Distribution-Based Score Fusion + RRF. Sparse vectors native; filtering via ANN graph modification.
- Chroma T1
Limited native hybrid (users build RRF custom). Fast Rust core (v2.5). Acquired by Replit (definitive agreement announced 2026-10-23); Chroma Cloud is winding down (writes disabled 2026-11-22, reads disabled 2026-12-22) while open-source ChromaDB continues under Apache-2.0.
- pgvector T1
Stores embeddings alongside relational + full-text data. HNSW + IVFFlat ANN indexes. Used as agent conversation memory via LangChain + MCP. Foundation of Supabase AI and many self-hosted RAG stacks.
- Weaviate T1
Hybrid Search 2.0 with learned ranking. BM25 + vector in unified index.
- Pinecone T1
Managed vector DB. Cascading sparse + dense + rerank pipeline; pinecone-rerank-v0 .
- MongoDB Atlas Vector Search T1
Agent memory store for both short-term (document) and long-term (vector). LangGraph checkpointer for stateful agents. Vector search extended to Community Edition (Sept 2025).
Sources (59 cited facts, 10 third-party)
Each fact links to the page it came from; the badge says who published it (how to read sources).
- What it is Multi-vector + hybrid + GPU vendor
- What it does & what's distinct Multi-vector columns (10 simultaneous). Native hybrid search (v2.5). CAGRA + Vamana GPU/… vendor
- Claims / benefits 40,000+ GitHub★ milestone reinforcing leadership in OSS vector DBs; 10,000+ enterprise d… vendor
- Modalities text vendor
- Created 2019-09 vendor
- Latest release v3.0.3 (2026-10-14) vendor
- License Apache-2.0 repo
- GitHub milvus-io/milvus — ~46k stars, last commit 2026-10 repo
- Mindshare 1 inbound 134 HN · 2 press third-party
- Funding $113M total (Zilliz: $43M 2020 + $60M 2022); Zilliz is the commercial entity third-party
- Customers / scale 10000+ organizations; eBay, Tencent, Walmart, IKEA, Intuit, Compass, Nvidia, PayPal, AT&… third-party
- Pricing free (OSS); managed via Zilliz Cloud (free tier, then usage-based) third-party
- Compliance SOC 2 Type II; HIPAA (Zilliz Cloud); ISO 27001 third-party
- Data handling Customer data not used for model training; Zilliz Cloud data isolation enforced third-party
- Deployment Both (self-hosted OSS + Zilliz Cloud managed) vendor
- HQ US (San Francisco CA — Zilliz HQ) third-party
- Founders / pedigree Zilliz (Alibaba veterans); founded by Charles Xie (ex-Alibaba cloud) and Xiaofan Luan vendor
- Memory volume / scale billions of vectors (CNCF-grade; vendor claim) repo
- Performance VectorDBBench: Milvus is in top tier for 768d-OpenAI-1M (95% recall, ~5k QPS); supports … vendor
- API surface REST, gRPC, SDK: Python, Java, Go, Node.js, C#, Ruby vendor
- Backend storage custom (object-storage backed; etcd metadata; Pulsar/Kafka log) vendor
- Multi-tenancy Control plane and data plane in separate VPCs/subnets; BYOC option for hard tenant isola… third-party
- Encryption AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit (Zilliz Cloud); CMEK (GA on Zilliz Cloud) third-party
- SSO / RBAC RBAC only vendor
- Embedding model multiple supported vendor
- Consistency eventual vendor
- Versioning none vendor
- Tombstoning soft-delete only vendor
- Schema evolution schema with migration vendor
- Namespace primitives per-tenant vendor
- Contradiction handling always overwrite (last-write-wins) vendor
- Forgetting policy user-controlled forget vendor
- MCP support yes — official zilliztech/mcp-server-milvus (GitHub) repo
- OTel first-class — Prometheus + OTel vendor
- Import / export Parquet, JSON via bulk insert; backups vendor
- Runtimes Python, Go, Java, Node.js, C++ (+ RESTful API; C# community/Microsoft, Rust in developme… vendor
- Validated verticals RAG developers, agent builders (broad horizontal); financial-services, healthcare, legal… vendor
- Time to running <10min (managed cloud) to <1hr (self-host Docker) vendor
- Anti-fit not for relational / graph-heavy queries (vector-first by design) vendor
- Optimised for low-latency similarity search + scale vendor
- Adjacent infrastructure BYO embedding model + LLM; this IS the vector store vendor
- Pros Largest-scale OSS vector DB — billions of vectors comfortably; CNCF graduate; strong com… vendor
- Cons Operational complexity is high vs Pinecone-managed; documentation can be uneven across l… vendor
- Project & sources milvus.io GitHub milvus-io/milvus vendor
- commit-trajectory [{"ym":"2025-12","cum":23784},{"ym":"2026-01","cum":23988},{"ym":"2026-02","cum":24112},… repo
- download-trajectory [{"ym":"2025-11","monthly":2105033,"cum":2105033},{"ym":"2025-12","monthly":4422057,"cum… registry
- cost-input-usd-per-mtok 0 vendor
- cost-output-usd-per-mtok 0 vendor
- cost-tier free vendor
- cost-pricing-model free-tier vendor
- cost-last-verified 2026-06-29 vendor
- architecture-deployment-locus hybrid vendor
- licensing-bucket open-source repo
- positioning-platform-vs-product platform repo
- taxonomy-three-layer-rollup model-infra repo
- developer-activity-opendigger {"activity":639.88,"as_of":"2026-09","openrank_12mo":79.77,"openrank_current":61.72,"par… third-party
- sdk-languages go,java,python,rest,typescript vendor
- protocol-support mcp-server repo
- maturity ga vendor
What changed
Changes to this record's lifecycle, licence, release, pricing and hosting facts, from the catalog's git history. Subscribe (Atom)
- 2026-10-26
- Latest release “v2.6.15 2026-04-17” → “v3.0.3 (2026-10-14)” source
- Pricing “Free (OSS Apache-2.0) + Zilliz Cloud (pay-per-use managed)” → “free (OSS); managed via Zilliz Cloud (free tier, then usage-based)” source
- MCP support “via official adapter — milvus-mcp” → “yes — official zilliztech/mcp-server-milvus (GitHub)” source
Related systems
References (28)
- Arize Phoenix integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Arize Phoenix integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- CAMEL integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + CAMEL integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Cognee integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Cognee integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Cohere Embed integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Cohere Embed integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Confident AI / DeepEval integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Confident AI / DeepEval integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- DeepSeek R1 / V3 family integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + DeepSeek R1 / V3 family integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Dify integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Dify integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- DSPy integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + DSPy integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Fireworks AI integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Fireworks AI integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Google Gemini 3 family integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Google Gemini 3 family integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Haystack (framework) integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Haystack (framework) integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Jina AI Embeddings integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Jina AI Embeddings integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + LangChain (framework) integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Langflow integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Langflow integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Langfuse integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Langfuse integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Letta / MemGPT integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Letta / MemGPT integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + LlamaIndex (framework) integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mem0 integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Mem0 integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mistral Large 2 / Mixtral family integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Mistral Large 2 / Mixtral family integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Model Context Protocol (MCP spec) integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Model Context Protocol (MCP spec) integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- n8n (AI agent flows) integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + n8n (AI agent flows) integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Agents SDK integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + OpenAI Agents SDK integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- OpenAI Embeddings integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + OpenAI Embeddings integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Phidata (now Agno) integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Phidata integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Ragas integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Ragas integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Sentence Transformers integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Sentence Transformers integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- vLLM integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + vLLM integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Voyage AI (MongoDB) integrates with — Milvus's integrations overview lists a Milvus + Voyage AI (MongoDB) integration tutorial. (verified 2026-10-29)
Referenced by (16)
- Cohere Embed integrates with — Cohere docs "Integrating Embedding Models with Other Tools": Milvus and Cohere guide. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Dify integrates with — Dify self-host VECTOR_STORE supports `milvus` as the knowledge-base vector store. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) integrates with — ADK integrations catalog has a "Milvus integration for ADK" page (Milvus-backed memory and RAG retrieval for ADK agents). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Haystack (framework) integrates with — Haystack integrations directory has a Milvus integration page ("Use the Milvus vector database with Haystack"). (verified 2026-10-29)
- LangChain (framework) integrates with — LangChain docs have a Milvus integration provider page (Open-source vector database for AI applications). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Langflow integrates with — Langflow components bundle: Milvus vector store component. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Langfuse integrates with — Langfuse's integrations directory has a Milvus integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LiteLLM integrates with — LiteLLM docs have a Milvus vector stores provider page. (verified 2026-10-29)
- LlamaIndex (framework) integrates with — LlamaIndex has an official vector store integration package llama-index-vector-stores-milvus in its repo. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Mem0 integrates with — Mem0 docs have a Milvus vector store page for Mem0 open source. (verified 2026-10-29)
- memsearch (Zilliz) depends on at runtime — Claude Code, Codex, DSH), backed by Markdown and Milvus.
- n8n (AI agent flows) integrates with — n8n built-in AI cluster node: Milvus Vector Store node. (verified 2026-10-29)
- NVIDIA ReMEmbR builds on — storing captions with timestamps + 3D position coordinates in MilvusDB
- OpenLLMetry (Traceloop) integrates with — OpenLLMetry's What's Supported page lists Milvus as instrumented out of the box. (verified 2026-10-29)
- Phidata (now Agno) integrates with — Agno ships a milvus vector DB integration module (agno.vectordb.milvus). (verified 2026-10-29)
- Portkey AI integrates with — Portkey docs have a Milvus vector database integration page. (verified 2026-10-29)