Milvus is an open-source vector database built for scalable AI similarity search — designed to handle billions of vectors with millisecond query latency, supporting multiple index types (IVF, HNSW, DiskANN) and hybrid search combining vector similarity with scalar filtering.

Key Features

• Scale: Handles 1B+ vectors with distributed architecture.
• Index Types: IVF_FLAT, IVF_SQ8, HNSW, DiskANN for different speed/accuracy tradeoffs.
• Hybrid Search: Combine vector similarity with attribute filtering.
• Cloud: Zilliz Cloud for managed deployment.
• GPU Acceleration: NVIDIA GPU-powered indexing and search.

Use Cases: RAG retrieval, recommendation systems, image similarity, anomaly detection, drug discovery.

Comparison

• vs Pinecone: Open-source, self-hosted option, more index flexibility.
• vs Qdrant: Better GPU support, more mature at billion-scale.
• vs FAISS: Full database features (CRUD, filtering) vs library-only.

Milvus is the production choice for billion-scale vector search — combining open-source flexibility with enterprise-grade scalability.