Kinetica vs Milvus
Kinetica
kinetica.comMilvus
milvus.ioSide by side
| Figure | Kinetica | Milvus |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $1.80/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 8.6 (#6) | 8.3 (#8) |
| Spec score · Database Software | 8.0 (#52) | 8.2 (#39) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Kinetica's vector search page says embedding providers include OpenAI, NVIDIA NIM, and locally hosted models with a compatible inference endpoint. | The integrations documentation lists tools including LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, DSPy, Dify, Langflow, OpenAI, Cohere, and HuggingFace. |
| Intended users | The maker presents Kinetica for defense and intelligence, financial services, energy and utilities, telecommunications, logistics and supply chain, and insurance use cases. | The documentation describes Distributed as suited to enterprise users running large-scale vector search systems in production. |
| Product | Kinetica describes itself as a distributed, hardware-accelerated database for real-time analytics, combining SQL, vector, graph, time-series, and spatial workloads in one engine. | Milvus is an open-source vector database built for GenAI applications. |
| Security | Kinetica documents role-based permissions, granular access to tables and schemas, and row and column controls including masking and obfuscation. | Milvus documents user authentication, TLS encryption for gRPC and REST traffic, and role-based access control. |
| Support | Kinetica offers Basic, Standard, and Premium support tiers; Premium includes off-hours and weekend coverage, follow-the-sun case management, and monthly incident reporting. | The Milvus site lists community channels including Slack, Discord, GitHub, and Milvus Office Hours. |
Plans
Kinetica
- Dedicated Cloud$1.80 a month
- Developer EditionFree
- Enterprise EditionPriced on request
In their own words
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.