Key features
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
- Billion-scale vector search
- GPU-accelerated indexing
- Distributed architecture
- Multiple index types
- Cloud and self-hosted options
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Updated February 28, 2026
Milvus is an open-source vector database built for scalable similarity search, capable of handling billions of vectors. Backed by the Zilliz company, Milvus supports multiple index types (IVF, HNSW, DiskANN), GPU-accelerated search, and multi-tenancy. Zilliz Cloud offers a fully managed version with automatic scaling. Milvus is widely used in enterprise deployments requiring high-throughput vector search at scale.
Vespa is an open-source search and recommendation engine combining vector search, full-text search, and structured queries.
Core capabilities each platform advertises.
What each tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
Cons
Pros
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