product · May 16, 2026

Milvus Described as Open-Source Vector Database with Zilliz Cloud Managed Option

MindStudio published an overview of Milvus as the open-source vector database originally developed by Zilliz and released in 2019. Milvus supports billions of records with millisecond latency using indexing algorithms including HNSW and DiskANN plus hybrid search with scalar filtering. Zilliz Cloud provides the fully managed service with a free tier for small workloads and paid plans for larger scale while using the same pymilvus SDK. Milvus graduated as a CNCF project and competes with Pinecone, Weaviate, and Qdrant for RAG and AI agent memory use cases.