Milvus vs turbopuffer
Milvus
milvus.io
turbopuffer
turbopuffer.comSide by side
| Figure | Milvus | turbopuffer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $16/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 8.3 (#8) | 7.3 (#29) |
| Spec score · Vector Databases | 8.2 (#7) | 7.5 (#18) |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 8.2 (#11) | 7.3 (#25) |
| Product | Milvus is an open-source vector database built for GenAI applications. | turbopuffer is an object-storage-native database for vector and full-text search. |
| Scale | Milvus supports deployments from local notebook demos to Kubernetes clusters handling tens of billions of vectors. | The company says its production service handles 1T+ documents, 10M+ writes per second, and 25k+ queries per second. |
| Search | Milvus supports approximate nearest neighbor, filtering, range, hybrid, and full-text search, plus reranking, fetch, and query operations. | It supports vector search, text search, filters, regex search, and hybrid search. |
| Security | Milvus documents user authentication, TLS encryption for gRPC and REST traffic, and role-based access control. | Customer data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2+ and at rest with AES-256, with customer-managed keys optionally available. |
| Support | The Milvus site lists community channels including Slack, Discord, GitHub, and Milvus Office Hours. | The pricing page lists Community Slack and Email support on Launch, and private Slack support on Scale and Enterprise. |
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.
turbopuffer
turbopuffer has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.