Comparison

Milvus vs Qdrant

No clear leader: Milvus (57.2) and Qdrant (55.8) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.

Machine formatsMarkdownJSONGraphQLMarkdown is open. JSON and GraphQL need a free key.
Milvus57
Qdrant56
Score
vioscaleAI score
Milvus57 / 100medium · 57%
Qdrant56 / 100medium · 65%
Pricing
Free tier
Milvus✓
Qdrant✓
Model
Price level
Milvusfree
Qdrantlow
Transparent
Milvus✗
Qdrant✓
Integrations
Count
Milvus2
Qdrant4
Adoption
Dependent repos
Milvus7
Qdrant0
Github stars
Milvus46,375
Qdrant35,060
Activity
Commits last 30d
Milvus100
Qdrant100
Release
Cadence days
Milvus7
Qdrant18
History
Milvus20 items
Qdrant20 items
License
Spdx
Language
Primary
MilvusGo
QdrantRust
Market
Availability
Milvus–
Content
Faq
Milvus6 items
Qdrant7 items

Capabilities

Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for vector databases. “-” means undocumented, not absent.

Deployment
Deployment
MilvusSelf-hosted
QdrantSelf-hosted
Serverless / consumption pricing
Milvus✓
Qdrant-
Index
ANN index (HNSW / IVF / DiskANN / ScaNN / flat)
MilvusHNSW, IVF, FLAT, SCANN, DiskANN, GPU_CAGRA
QdrantHNSW
Distance metrics (cosine / dot / Euclidean)
Milvuscosine, Euclidean, dot product
Qdrantdot product
Query
Metadata filtering
MilvusPre-filter
Qdrant-
Hybrid search (dense + sparse fusion)
Milvus✓
Qdrant✓
Built-in BM25 / lexical
Milvus✓
Qdrant✓
Storage
Quantization
MilvusProduct
QdrantScalar
On-disk vs in-memory
MilvusDisk-backed
QdrantDisk-backed
Scale
Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants)
Milvus✓
Qdrant✓
Horizontal scale
MilvusSharded / distributed
QdrantSharded / distributed
Consistency
Consistency
MilvusEventual
Qdrant-
Licensing
Licence class
MilvusPermissive OSS
QdrantSource-available
Classification
Purpose-built vs feature-of-parent
MilvusDedicated DBMS
QdrantDedicated DBMS

What each one is

The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.

Milvus

A high-performance, distributed vector database that enables fast similarity search across billions of high-dimensional vectors, supporting real-time updates, flexible metadata filtering, and hybrid search capabilities for AI and machine learning applications.

Independently observed

Qdrant

A database system designed for storing and searching vectors with comprehensive filtering capabilities. It provides production-ready APIs and tools for semantic similarity matching and embedding-based applications.

Independently observed

Pricing

List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.

Milvus

Open sourceFree tier
as of verify ↗

Qdrant

Usage-basedFree tier

Usage-based pricing billed monthly based on CPU, memory, and disk storage consumption. Free tier available.

as of verify ↗

Platform & deployment

Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.

Platforms
Web
Milvus✓
Qdrant✓
Linux
Milvus✓
Qdrant✗
CLI
Milvus✓
Qdrant✗
Deployment
Cloud / SaaS
Milvus✓
Qdrant✓
Self-hosted
Milvus✓
Qdrant✓
On-premise
Milvus✗
Qdrant✓

Integrations

What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.

Milvus

8 total
  • OpenAI
  • Sentence Transformers
  • BGE-M3
  • SPLADE
  • Jina AI
  • BM25
  • PyMilvus
  • Jina
Independently observed

Qdrant

14 total
  • Slack
  • Adobe
  • Hubspot
  • Arize
  • Google DeepMind
  • Qualcomm
  • Cohere
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Azure
  • LangChain
  • FastEmbed
  • Google Cloud Storage
  • Azure Blob Storage
Independently observed
Still deciding?

Milvus or Qdrant: which one depends on you

A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.

Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works

Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.