Milvus
ZillizCloud-native vector database built for scalable approximate nearest neighbor search at billion-scale. Supports hybrid search combining vector similarity with scalar filtering. The most-starred dedicated vector database on GitHub (44K stars) with strong enterprise adoption. Open-source core with Zilliz Cloud as the managed offering. The go-to choice for production RAG systems that need to scale.
v2.6.x stable (late 2025); v3.0 RC published May 2026; LF AI & Data project
Openness
5 high confidence- license
- Apache-2.0
- source
- public
- core-gated
- ungated
license:Apache-2.0;source:public;LF-AI&Data-governed(Zilliz-Cloud is managed hosting, not gated core)
- https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/blob/master/LICENSE recorded 2026-06-04
flagship phase-C verification source
- https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus recorded 2026-06-04
flagship phase-C verification source
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milvus_(vector_database) recorded 2026-06-04
flagship phase-C verification source
Adoption
3 high confidenceDescribed as the default open source engine for billion-scale semantic search; LF AI & Data graduate. No precise verified deployment/download count, rated 3 on reported traction.
- https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus recorded 2026-06-04
flagship phase-C verification source
- https://zilliz.com/what-is-milvus recorded 2026-06-04
flagship phase-C verification source
Capability
4 high confidenceHigh-performance cloud-native vector ANN search; covered by independent ANN-Benchmarks and first-party VectorDBBench. v2.6 adds Storage Format V2, advanced JSON, BM25 full-text search. Rated on ANN benchmark coverage / scale.
- https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus recorded 2026-06-04
flagship phase-C verification source
- https://milvus.io/ recorded 2026-06-04
flagship phase-C verification source
Unchanged since 2026-07-30 (last edited, not re-checked)