Milvus vs Elasticsearch
Compare deployment options, cost efficiency, and features to choose the right vector database for your application.
Database Comparison
Milvus takes the lead.
Both Milvus and Elasticsearch are powerful vector databases designed for efficient similarity search and storage. However, their deployment options and features differ in important ways.
Why Milvus:
- Milvus ranks higher overall
- Elasticsearch offers more deployment options
- Milvus is more cost-effective
- Milvus has more permissive licensing
- Elasticsearch has 3 more strengths
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.
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is one of Europe's most widely deployed open-source search engines that includes native vector database capabilities. It combines dense vector search with traditional full-text BM25 keyword search for powerful hybrid retrieval, making it ideal for RAG applications that need both semantic and lexical search capabilities.
Feature Comparison
Infrastructure & Technical Details
| Feature | Milvus | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud | Self-Hosted, Managed Cloud, Serverless |
| Cost | Free (self-hosted), infra cost only | Serverless: usage-based (ECU); Hosted: starts ~$95/month; Self-hosted: free (infra cost only) |
| License | Apache 2.0 | AGPL v3 / SSPL / Elastic License 2.0 |
| Index Types | IVF, HNSW, DiskANN | HNSW, int8_hnsw, int4_hnsw, bbq_hnsw, Flat |
| Cloud Providers | Any | AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba Cloud |
| Regional Flexibility | high | high |
| Strengths | 9 | 12 |
| Weaknesses | 6 | 8 |