LanceDB vs Milvus
Compare deployment options, cost efficiency, and features to choose the right vector database for your application. If you want to compare these models on your data, try Agentset.
Database Comparison
LanceDB takes the lead.
Both LanceDB and Milvus are powerful vector databases designed for efficient similarity search and storage. However, their deployment options and features differ in important ways.
Why LanceDB:
- LanceDB ranks higher overall
- LanceDB offers more deployment options
- LanceDB has 4 more strengths
Vector Databases Are Just One Piece of RAG
Agentset gives you a managed RAG pipeline with the top-ranked models and best practices baked in. No infrastructure to maintain, no vector database to operate.
Trusted by teams building production RAG applications
LanceDB
LanceDB is an open-source, AI-native multimodal lakehouse designed for billion-scale vector search. Built on the Lance columnar format, it combines embedded simplicity with cloud-scale performance. LanceDB's disk-based architecture with compute-storage separation enables up to 100x cost savings compared to memory-based solutions while supporting multimodal data (text, images, video, audio).
Milvus
Milvus is a flexible, open-source vector database built for local and hybrid cloud deployment. With support for IVF, HNSW, and DiskANN, it provides the widest indexing variety for tuning performance on large-scale workloads. Milvus is ideal when you want control, configurability, and low infrastructure cost.
Build RAG in Minutes, Not Months
Agentset gives you a complete RAG API with fully managed vector storage and retrieval. Upload your data, call the API, and get accurate results from day one.
import { Agentset } from "agentset";
const agentset = new Agentset();
const ns = agentset.namespace("ns_1234");
const results = await ns.search(
"What is multi-head attention?"
);
for (const result of results) {
console.log(result.text);
}Feature Comparison
Infrastructure & Technical Details
| Feature | LanceDB | Milvus |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Embedded/Local, Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud (LanceDB Cloud) | Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud |
| Cost | OSS: Free; Cloud: usage-based with $100 free credits; Enterprise: custom pricing | Free (self-hosted), infra cost only |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Index Types | IVF-PQ, IVF-HNSW-PQ, BTree | IVF, HNSW, DiskANN |
| Cloud Providers | AWS, Azure, GCP, Any (self-hosted) | Any |
| Regional Flexibility | high | high |
| Strengths | 13 | 9 |
| Weaknesses | 9 | 6 |