Purpose-built databases for storing, indexing, and querying high-dimensional vector embeddings used in semantic search, RAG, and recommendation systems.
18 tools compared · Layer 2 · Updated March 1, 2026
Ranked by community traction, recent activity, and popularity.
Milvus
Billion-scale vector search
Milvus is an open-source vector database built for scalable similarity search, capable of handling billions of vectors in distributed environments. Created by Zilliz, a company founded in 2017 by Charles Xie (former founding engineer of Oracle 12c cloud database), Milvus has become one of the most widely deployed vector databases with over 30,000 GitHub stars.
Pinecone
Fully managed serverless vector database
Pinecone is the most widely used managed vector database, purpose-built for similarity search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Founded in 2019 by Dr. Edo Liberty, former Head of Amazon AI Labs at AWS, Pinecone offers serverless and pod-based architectures supporting billions of vectors with single-digit millisecond query latency.
Key factors to weigh when comparing tools in this category.