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.