Milvus

Judgement

What it is

Building block

What it does

A distributed vector database for storing embeddings and running approximate nearest-neighbour search at very large scale, with filtering and hybrid search.

Adopt it when

You need vector search over hundreds of millions of embeddings or more and have the people to run a distributed system.

Watch out

Cluster mode depends on etcd, object storage and a message queue, so smaller projects are better off with Milvus Lite, pgvector or Zilliz Cloud.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server, cloud service and library

Built with

Go, C++, etcd and MinIO

How established

Established: started 7 years ago, latest release v3.0.5.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Built from

Follow it down: Milvus → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

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Commercial vector databases

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