Vespa vs Zilliz Cloud
Vespa
vespa.ai
Zilliz Cloud
zilliz.comSide by side
| Figure | Vespa | Zilliz Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 7 | 4 |
| Spec score · Vector Databases | 8.8 (#3) | 7.3 (#23) |
| Spec score · Ai Databases | 8.7 (#5) | 7.3 (#31) |
| Spec score · Search Databases | 8.7 (#5) | 7.3 (#26) |
| Spec score · Search & Vector Database Platforms | 8.7 (#6) | 7.3 (#16) |
| Founded | Gartner Peer Insights lists Vespa’s founding year as 2023. | 2017 |
| Headquarters | Vespa says its headquarters and engineering hub are in Trondheim, Norway. | Redwood Shores, California, United States |
| Integrations | Vespa Cloud Enclave can run applications in customer accounts on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. | Documented integrations include Prometheus, Datadog, AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, and external model providers. |
| Product | Vespa is an AI search platform for online data-driven applications that combines retrieval, ranking, machine-learning inference, and real-time serving. | Zilliz Cloud is a fully managed Milvus service for deploying and scaling vector search applications. |
| Scaling | Vespa distributes functions across node clusters and supports changing cluster size without impacting queries or writes. | Serverless clusters scale automatically to zero. |
| Search | Vespa supports vector and tensor search, positional text search, and search over structured data. | The service supports approximate nearest neighbor vector search, filtered search, hybrid search, and full-text search. |
| Security | The Vespa Cloud security guide describes data-plane requests protected with mutual TLS or, optionally, tokens, and says Vespa.ai has a SOC 2 attestation. | Zilliz Cloud documents TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and AES-256 encryption at rest. |
| Support | The Startup plan includes community support only with no SLA; Cloud plans list unlimited support cases, with response times varying by plan. | Users can contact Zilliz Support to request access to features in private preview. |
| Who it is for | Vespa describes the platform for teams building AI applications where search quality, ranking, fresh real-time data, or increasing retrieval traffic are important. | The Standard plan is described as suited to prototypes and testing, while Enterprise is suited to production applications and Business Critical to healthcare, finance, and mission-critical systems. |
Plans
Vespa
- StartupPrice not published
- BasicPrice not published
- CommercialPrice not published
- EnterprisePrice not published
- StartupFree
- Enterprise *$0.18 a month
- Self ManagedPriced on request
Zilliz Cloud
- Free clusterFree
- Business CriticalPriced on request
- DedicatedPriced on request
- ServerlessPriced on request
In their own words
Vespa
Vespa is an AI search platform for online applications that use data, retrieval, ranking, machine-learning inference, and real-time serving. It supports vector and tensor search, positional text search, and queries over structured data. Ranking signals can be combined with tensor functions or machine-learned models, including ONNX and XGBoost formats; model inference can use ONNX Runtime. Vespa distributes functions across node clusters and allows cluster size changes without affecting queries or writes. Teams can self-manage deployments, use the Vespa Kubernetes Operator, or run on Vespa Cloud. Local deployment guidance lists Linux, macOS, and Windows 10 Pro on x86_64 or arm64 with Docker Desktop or Podman Desktop. Vespa Cloud includes encryption at rest and in transit, certificates for nodes and endpoints, and automatic operating system patching. Its trial provides $300 in credits without requiring a credit card, then stops the application when credits are used. Cloud plans have quotas, and Startup is limited to development zones. Pricing is listed from $0.05 a month, with metered resource rates.
Zilliz Cloud
Zilliz Cloud is a managed Milvus service for deploying and scaling vector search applications. It supports approximate nearest neighbor, filtered, hybrid, and full-text search. Teams can choose Free, Serverless, or Dedicated cluster deployments; Serverless clusters scale automatically to zero. During ingestion, the service can create vector embeddings from raw text using a configured embedding function.
Documented integrations include Prometheus, Datadog, AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, and external model providers. Migration sources include Pinecone, Qdrant, Elasticsearch, and PostgreSQL. The service supports sparse vectors, metadata filtering, up to 32768 dimensions, and a range of index types, including FLAT, HNSW, DISKANN, and AUTOINDEX. SDKs are listed for Python, Java, Go, Node.js, and C++. The Free cluster costs nothing and includes 5 GB storage, 2.5M vCUs/month, and up to 5 collections. Dedicated and Serverless pricing is pay as you go; storage charges apply to stored data and backup files even when a cluster is stopped.