Milvus / Zilliz Cloud
the credible answer at a billion vectors
the widest index selection anywhere and genuine billion-scale — and version 2.6 removed the external message queue that made it painful to run.
milvus supports more index types than anything else here: the ivf family, hnsw with several quantization variants, diskann for on-disk, gpu indexes including cagra, binary and sparse indexes. at very large scale that breadth is the point — you need diskann or gpu when memory-resident hnsw stops being affordable.
version 2.6 is the most consequential release in this category recently. hot and cold tiered storage with on-demand loading, one-bit rabitq quantization, int8 hnsw, support for over a hundred thousand collections for multi-tenancy, and — most importantly — a new internal write-ahead log that removes the kafka or pulsar dependency. that dependency was the main reason people avoided self-hosting it.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- vector databases
- pricing
- free self-hosted; zilliz cloud billed per compute unit
- website
- milvus.io
the widest index selection anywhere and genuine billion-scale — and version 2.6 removed the external message queue that made it painful to run.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.
more vector databases
pgvector
we checked thisfree — PostgreSQL Licensethe correct default for most teams, and it quietly got good
Qdrant
we checked thisfree tier; cloud billed hourly on compute and storagefiltering built into the graph traversal, not bolted around it