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SPECIFICTION
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Elasticsearch vs Milvus

Elasticsearch

elastic.co

Milvus

milvus.io

Side by side

FigureElasticsearchMilvus
Price from$99/moFree
Free plan—Yes
Free trialYes—
Open source——
WebYes—
LinuxYesYes
APIYesYes
Self-hostedYesYes
Plans published81
Spec score · Vector Databases8.5 (#4)8.2 (#7)
Spec score · Ai Databases8.4 (#7)8.3 (#8)
Spec score · Search Databases8.3 (#10)8.2 (#11)
DeploymentIt can run on premises, in the cloud, across clouds, or as a managed serverless service.Milvus offers Lite as a Python library, Standalone as a single-machine server, and Distributed for Kubernetes clusters.
IntegrationsElastic describes 350+ integrations and supports ingestion through Elastic Agent, connectors, APIs, language clients, and Logstash.The integrations documentation lists tools including LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, DSPy, Dify, Langflow, OpenAI, Cohere, and HuggingFace.
SearchIt supports full-text, semantic, and hybrid search with filters, ranking, and reranking.Milvus supports approximate nearest neighbor, filtering, range, hybrid, and full-text search, plus reranking, fetch, and query operations.
SupportElastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless offer four support tiers depending on subscription tier.The Milvus site lists community channels including Slack, Discord, GitHub, and Milvus Office Hours.

Plans

Elasticsearch

  • BasicPriced on request
  • Standard$99 a month
  • Gold$114 a month
  • Platinum$131 a month
  • Enterprise$184 a month
  • Elastic Cloud HostedPrice not published
  • Elastic Cloud ServerlessPrice not published
  • Self-managed ElasticsearchPriced on request

Elasticsearch pricing →

Milvus

  • Milvus (open-source software)Free

Milvus pricing →

In their own words

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit elastic.co

Milvus

Milvus is an open-source vector database from Zilliz for GenAI and scalable vector search. It supports approximate-nearest-neighbor, filtered, range, hybrid, and full-text search, along with reranking, fetch, and query operations. Metadata filtering, sparse vectors, and index types including HNSW, IVF, FLAT, DiskANN, and SCANN are documented. Deployment choices are Milvus Lite as a Python library, Standalone as a single-machine server, and Distributed on Kubernetes. Documentation recommends Lite for up to a few million vectors, Standalone up to 100 million, and Distributed for 100 million to tens of billions. Lite can run locally without a cloud service for private or sensitive data; an online upgrade from Standalone to a cluster is not currently supported. Official interfaces include REST plus Python, Go, Java, Node.js, and C++ APIs or SDKs. C# is contributed by Microsoft and Rust is under development. Security documentation covers authentication, TLS for gRPC and REST, and role-based access control at collection, database, and instance levels. The Apache 2.0 software is free, and Zilliz Cloud is offered as a managed option.

Visit milvus.io