Milvus

Distributed vector database designed for billion-scale workloads. Compute-storage separation, GPU-accelerated index builds, multi-tenant from the ground up. The pick when you've outgrown Qdrant single-node.

By Fredoline Eruo·Last verified May 6, 2026·30,000 GitHub stars

Overview

Stack & relationships

How Milvus relates to other entries in the catalog — recommended pairings, alternatives, dependencies, and edges to avoid. Each edge carries a one-line operator note from our editorial team.

Milvus ↔ ecosystem

Works with

Works with
AnythingLLM
Production-scale vector store. Wire it when you're past the LanceDB scaling ceiling.

Alternatives

Competes with
Qdrant
Qdrant is single-node-friendly and fast to deploy; Milvus is the heavy-duty distributed option for the 100M+ vector scale.
Alternative to
Qdrant
Milvus targets 100M+ vector scale with distributed deployment; Qdrant is single-node-friendly. Switch from Qdrant to Milvus only when you've outgrown single-node.

Pros

Genuinely scales to 10B+ vectors
GPU index acceleration
Multi-tenancy built in

Cons

Operationally heavy — Kubernetes recommended
Overkill for under 100M vectors

Compatibility

Operating systems	Linux Docker Kubernetes
GPU backends	NVIDIA CUDA (optional acceleration)
License	Open source · free (OSS) + Zilliz Cloud

Get Milvus

Official site

https://milvus.io

GitHub

https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus

Frequently asked

Is Milvus free?

Milvus has a paid tier (free (OSS) + Zilliz Cloud). Check the pricing page for current terms.

What operating systems does Milvus support?

Milvus supports Linux, Docker, Kubernetes.

Which GPUs work with Milvus?

Milvus supports NVIDIA CUDA (optional acceleration). CPU-only inference is also possible but slow.

Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we evaluate tools.