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Elastic Search vs Milvus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (11th), Search as a Service (1st)
Milvus
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 7.0%, up from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 9.3%, up from 8.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Captures data from all other sources and becomes a MOM aka monitoring of monitors
Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve. Their license terms are based on the number of cores. If you increase the number of cores, it becomes very difficult to manage at a large scale. For example, if I have a $3 million project, I won't sell it because if we're dealing with a 10 TB or 50 TB system, there are a lot of systems and applications to monitor, and I have to make an MOM (Mean of Max) for everything. This is because of the cost impact. Also, when you have horizontal scaling, it's like a multi-story building with only one elevator. You have to run around, and it's not efficient. Even the smallest task becomes difficult. That's the problem with horizontal scaling. They need to improve this because if they increase the cores and adjust the licensing accordingly, it would make more sense.
Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides quick and easy containerization, but documentation is not very user-friendly
Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly. Chroma DB provides super user-friendly documentation, enabling new users to get started quickly. Chroma DB's setup doesn't have many dependencies, whereas Milvus usually comes with some dependencies because of the way it needs to be deployed. Unlike Milvus, it's very easy to do POCs with Chroma DB.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Enterprise Search is the opportunity to search behind and between different logs."
"The most valuable feature is the out of the box Kibana."
"The initial setup is fairly simple."
"It's a stable solution and we have not had any issues."
"I really like the visualization that you can do within it. That's really handy. Product-wise, it is a very good and stable product."
"Dashboard is very customizable."
"It gives us the possibility to store and query this data and also do this efficiently and securely and without delays."
"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
"Milvus offers multiple methods for calculating similarities or distances between vectors, such as L2 norm and cosine similarity. These methods help in comparing different vectors based on specific use cases. For instance, in our use case, we find that the L2 distance works best, but you can experiment with different methods to find the most suitable one for your needs."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
 

Cons

"The GUI is the part of the program which has the most room for improvement."
"I would like to be able to do correlations between multiple indexes."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"The solution has quite a steep learning curve. The usability and general user-friendliness could be improved. However, that is kind of typical with products that have a lot of flexibility, or a lot of capabilities. Sometimes having more choices makes things more complex. It makes it difficult to configure it, though. It's kind of a bitter pill that you have to swallow in the beginning and you really have to get through it."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
"They're making changes in their architecture too frequently."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"The real-time search functionality is not operational due to its impact on system resources."
"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."
"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."
"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It can move from $10,000 US Dollars per year to any price based on how powerful you need the searches to be and the capacity in terms of storage and process."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"I rate Elastic Search's pricing an eight out of ten."
"​The pricing and license model are clear: node-based model."
"It can be expensive."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The price of Elasticsearch is fair. It is a more expensive solution, like QRadar. The price for Elasticsearch is not much more than other solutions we have."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ELK Elasticsearch?
Logsign provides us with the capability to execute multiple queries according to our requirements. The indexing is very high, making it effective for storing and retrieving logs. The real-time anal...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am not directly involved with pricing or setup costs. While I know a portion is open-source, a paid version might be necessary.
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
There should be more stability. When we started learning it, new versions came out frequently in one quarter with extended features. This can create problems for new developers because they have to...
What do you like most about Milvus?
I like the accuracy and usability.
What needs improvement with Milvus?
Milvus could be improved how it could automatically generate insights from the data it holds. Milvus maintains embedding information and knows the relationships between data points. It would be use...
What is your primary use case for Milvus?
Milvus is primarily used in RAG, which involves retrieving relevant documents or data to augment the generation of new content. Milvus helps convert text and other data into a vector space, and the...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
1. Alibaba Group 2. Tencent 3. Baidu 4. JD.com 5. Meituan 6. Xiaomi 7. Didi Chuxing 8. ByteDance 9. Huawei 10. ZTE 11. Lenovo 12. Haier 13. China Mobile 14. China Telecom 15. China Unicom 16. Ping An Insurance 17. China Life Insurance 18. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 19. Bank of China 20. Agricultural Bank of China 21. China Construction Bank 22. PetroChina 23. Sinopec 24. China National Offshore Oil Corporation 25. China Southern Airlines 26. Air China 27. China Eastern Airlines 28. China Railway Group 29. China Railway Construction Corporation 30. China Communications Construction Company 31. China Merchants Group 32. China Evergrande Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Milvus and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.