LLMs & AI Infra Vector DB stable

Milvus

Cloud-native vector DB for billion-scale AI search

32.0K stars 500 contributors Since 2021
Website → GitHub

Distributed vector database designed for billion-scale similarity search with GPU indexing, hybrid search, and multi-tenancy support.

License
Apache-2.0
Min RAM
8 GB
Min CPUs
4 cores
Scaling
distributed
Complexity
intermediate
Performance
enterprise grade
Self-hostable
K8s native
Offline
Pricing
fully free
Docs quality
good
Vendor lock-in
none

Use cases

  • RAG retrieval backend for LLM applications
  • Product recommendation via embedding similarity
  • Semantic document search across knowledge base
  • Image similarity search for e-commerce

Anti-patterns / when NOT to use

  • Not for traditional OLTP/OLAP queries
  • Heavy resource requirements
  • Complex cluster management

Replaces / alternatives to

  • Pinecone
  • proprietary vector search

Technical specs

Language
GoC++
API type
RESTgRPC
Protocols
HTTP
Data model
vectordocument
Deployment
dockerbinary
SDKs
pythonjavascriptgorust

Community

GitHub stars 32.0K
Contributors 500
Commit frequency daily
Plugin ecosystem none
Backing Zilliz
Funding vc_backed

Release

Latest version
Last release
Since 2021

Best fit

Team size
solosmallmediumenterprise
Industries
saase-commercehealthcarelegaleducation

Tags

  • vector-database
  • similarity-search
  • embeddings
  • semantic-search
  • rag
  • ai-infrastructure