# Milvus vs txtai

| Attribute | Milvus | txtai |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 58.7 (52% (medium)) | 62.9 (56% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | 70 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 7 | 14 |
| adoption.github_stars | 45,802 | 12,909 |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | A distributed database system for storing and searching high-dimensional vectors at scale. Supports multiple deployment models from local notebooks to cloud-managed services, with capabilities for hybrid search combining dense and sparse embeddings. | txtai is an open-source Python framework for building semantic search applications, LLM-powered agents, retrieval augmented generation systems, and language model workflows with support for multiple vector backends and integration with various LLMs. |
| features.capabilities | `{"serverless":true,"consistency":"eventual","quantization":"product","storage_tier":"disk_backed","hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"permissive_oss","multi_tenancy":true,"product_class":"dedicated_dbms","full_text_bm25":true,"distance_metrics":"cosine, Euclidean, dot product","horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed","metadata_filtering":"pre_filter"}` | `{"ann_index":"HNSW, IVF, IVFSparse, milvus-lite, turbovec, zvec","deployment":"embedded","consistency":"tunable","open_source":true,"quantization":"scalar","storage_tier":"disk_backed","hybrid_search":true,"licence_class":"permissive_oss","multi_tenancy":true,"product_class":"dedicated_dbms","full_text_bm25":true,"multimodal_rag":true,"distance_metrics":"cosine","horizontal_scale":"sharded_distributed","hybrid_retrieval":true,"metadata_filtering":"pre_filter","citation_attribution":true,"llm_provider_agnostic":true,"managed_ingestion_pipeline":true,"embedding_provider_agnostic":true,"multi_hop_agentic_retrieval":true}` |
| integrations.count | 7 | 10 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Sentence Transformers"},{"name":"BGE-M3"},{"name":"SPLADE"},{"name":"Jina AI"},{"name":"BM25"},{"name":"PyMilvus"}]` | `[{"name":"llama.cpp"},{"name":"LiteLLM"},{"name":"Hugging Face"},{"name":"OpenAI"},{"name":"Claude"},{"name":"AWS Bedrock"},{"name":"smolagents"},{"name":"OpenCode"},{"name":"DuckDB"},{"name":"Milvus"},{"name":"LiteRT"}]` |
| language.primary | Go | Python |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"hybrid","summary":"Open-source free; managed cloud service available","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://milvus.io","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T13:40:14.941Z"}` | `{"type":"open_source","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://neuml.github.io/txtai","retrievedAt":"2026-08-21T12:43:59.946Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | yes | yes |
| pricing.model | freemium | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | low | free |
| pricing.transparent | no | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 6 | 26 |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.22","date":"2026-08-04T01:55:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.22"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v3.0.0","date":"2026-07-29T14:27:06Z","type":"stable","version":"v3.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.21","date":"2026-07-24T06:50:28Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.21"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/client/v3.0.0-beta","date":"2026-07-19T14:35:01Z","type":"prerelease","version":"client/v3.0.0-beta"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.20","date":"2026-07-14T06:44:48Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.20"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.19","date":"2026-06-26T11:47:18Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.19"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.18","date":"2026-06-05T04:03:06Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.18"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/client/v2.6.5","date":"2026-05-26T02:44:44Z","type":"stable","version":"client/v2.6.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.17","date":"2026-05-22T03:15:16Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.17"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.16","date":"2026-05-14T04:15:09Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.16"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v3.0-beta","date":"2026-05-09T04:49:46Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v3.0-beta"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/client/v2.6.4","date":"2026-05-08T02:40:41Z","type":"stable","version":"client/v2.6.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.15","date":"2026-04-17T02:29:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.15"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.14","date":"2026-04-07T02:08:37Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.14"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/client/v2.6.3","date":"2026-03-24T06:33:20Z","type":"stable","version":"client/v2.6.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.13","date":"2026-03-23T07:58:53Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.13"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.12","date":"2026-03-13T07:24:42Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.12"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.11","date":"2026-02-12T01:57:24Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.11"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.5.27","date":"2026-02-11T02:40:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.5.27"},{"url":"https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus/releases/tag/v2.6.10","date":"2026-02-05T01:34:08Z","type":"stable","version":"v2.6.10"}]` | `[{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.12.0","date":"2026-07-30T19:43:23Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.12.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.11.0","date":"2026-07-01T15:07:00Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.11.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.10.0","date":"2026-06-04T10:22:48Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.10.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.9.0","date":"2026-05-12T15:21:53Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.9.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.8.0","date":"2026-04-29T15:29:38Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.8.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.7.0","date":"2026-03-20T17:10:04Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.7.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.6.0","date":"2026-02-25T17:56:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.5.0","date":"2026-02-12T16:44:38Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.4.1","date":"2026-01-23T17:03:50Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.4.0","date":"2026-01-21T15:30:33Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.3.0","date":"2025-12-22T23:35:33Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.3.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.2.0","date":"2025-11-21T15:09:50Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.2.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.1.0","date":"2025-11-04T13:23:09Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.1.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.0.1","date":"2025-09-15T13:25:58Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.0.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v9.0.0","date":"2025-08-28T19:17:55Z","type":"stable","version":"v9.0.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v8.6.0","date":"2025-06-10T14:25:49Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v8.5.0","date":"2025-04-14T20:09:38Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v8.4.0","date":"2025-03-11T14:24:16Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.4.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v8.3.1","date":"2025-02-12T16:51:27Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.3.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/tag/v8.3.0","date":"2025-02-11T18:56:25Z","type":"stable","version":"v8.3.0"}]` |
| reliability.status_page | - | yes |
| security.scorecard | 4.4 | 4.9 |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=go&package_name=github.com%2Fmilvus-io%2Fmilvus%2Fpkg&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=pypi&package_name=txtai&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (Vector Databases)

| Capability | Milvus | txtai |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | - | Embedded |
| Serverless / consumption pricing | ✓ | - |
| **Index** |  |  |
| ANN index (HNSW / IVF / DiskANN / ScaNN / flat) | - | HNSW, IVF, IVFSparse, milvus-lite, turbovec, zvec |
| Distance metrics (cosine / dot / Euclidean) | cosine, Euclidean, dot product | cosine |
| **Query** |  |  |
| Metadata filtering | Pre-filter | Pre-filter |
| Hybrid search (dense + sparse fusion) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Built-in BM25 / lexical | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Storage** |  |  |
| Quantization | Product | Scalar |
| On-disk vs in-memory | Disk-backed | Disk-backed |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Multi-tenancy (namespaces / collections / tenants) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Horizontal scale | Sharded / distributed | Sharded / distributed |
| **Consistency** |  |  |
| Consistency | Eventual | Tunable |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Permissive OSS | Permissive OSS |
| **Classification** |  |  |
| Purpose-built vs feature-of-parent | Dedicated DBMS | Dedicated DBMS |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T17:21:58.270Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*