Milvus

Milvus is the vector database you reach for when you have billions of vectors and sub-100ms latency requirements. It was originally built at Zilliz and has become the standard for large-scale production vector search.

What it is

Milvus is a distributed vector database designed for billion-scale similarity search. It supports GPU-accelerated indexing, hybrid search (combining vector similarity with keyword/BM25), and comes with built-in sharding, replication, and change data capture.

How it stacks up

	Milvus	Qdrant	Chroma	Weaviate
Scale	Billion plus	100M plus	Under 10M	100M plus
Distributed	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
GPU indexing	Yes	No	No	No
Hybrid search	Yes	No	No	Yes
Complexity	High	Medium	Low	Medium
Best for	Massive scale	Production RAG	Prototyping	All-in-one

When to use something else

• Small to medium scale: Qdrant is simpler and fast enough
• Prototyping: Chroma has instant setup
• Built-in vectorization: Weaviate includes embedding models