Milvus alternatives
7 vector database that you might consider instead of Milvus.
Why look for Milvus alternatives?
Milvus is a CNCF-graduated open-source vector database built for massive scale, with managed cloud via Zilliz.
Depending on your stack, budget, and whether you prefer open-source software, one of the options below may be a better fit.
Pinecone
The vector database for AI applications
Pinecone is a managed vector database purpose-built for production AI workloads, offering serverless indexes, hybrid search, and low-latency queries at scale.
pgvector
Vector similarity search for Postgres
pgvector is an open-source Postgres extension that adds vector similarity search to any Postgres database. Runs anywhere Postgres runs (Supabase, Neon, RDS).
Qdrant
High-performance open source vector search
Qdrant is a Rust-based open-source vector database with strong filtering, payload storage, and managed cloud offering with generous free tier.
Weaviate
Open source vector database with built-in ML
Weaviate is an open-source vector database with native multi-modal search, built-in vectorizer modules, hybrid search, and cloud or self-hosted deployment.
Chroma
The AI-native open source embedding database
Chroma is an open-source embedding database designed for simplicity, with Python-first DX, perfect for prototyping and small-to-medium RAG apps.
LanceDB
Serverless vector database for multimodal AI
LanceDB is an open-source serverless vector database with embedded and cloud options, native multimodal support, and a columnar on-disk format.
turbopuffer
Serverless vector search on object storage
turbopuffer is a serverless vector database built on S3, offering very cheap storage pricing and pay-per-query model — designed for RAG at scale without fixed pod costs.