Milvus vs Swiftype
Milvus
milvus.ioSwiftype
swiftype.comSide by side
| Figure | Milvus | Swiftype |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $79/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 8.2 (#11) | 7.5 (#23) |
| Integrations | The integrations documentation lists tools including LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, DSPy, Dify, Langflow, OpenAI, Cohere, and HuggingFace. | The ecommerce page names Shopify and Magento as store platforms Swiftype can support. |
| Intended users | The documentation describes Distributed as suited to enterprise users running large-scale vector search systems in production. | Swiftype describes its search solutions for ecommerce, publishing, and customer support use cases. |
| Product | Milvus is an open-source vector database built for GenAI applications. | Swiftype provides hosted site search that indexes a website and creates a search engine, with an API for additional control. |
| Search features | Milvus supports approximate nearest neighbor, filtered, range, hybrid, and full-text search, as well as reranking and queries. | The site search product includes autocomplete, faceted search refinements, spelling correction, synonyms, and phrase matching. |
| Security | Milvus documents user authentication, TLS encryption for gRPC and REST traffic, and role-based access control. | Swiftype states it is SOC 2 compliant and lists encryption in transit and at rest, SAML-based SSO, and granular content permissions among its security features. |
| Support | The Milvus site lists community channels including Slack, Discord, GitHub, and Milvus Office Hours. | The pricing page lists email support, response time SLA, dedicated point of contact, and integration consultation among its support offerings. |
Plans
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.