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Milvus vs MongoDB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

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

Milvus
Ranking in Open Source Databases
10th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (7th)
MongoDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (1st), Managed NoSQL Databases (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 5.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MongoDB is 4.3%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Hamidul Islam - PeerSpot reviewer
Lightweight with good flexibility and very fast performance for searching data
I used the solution in the production level to search data and create education-based tutorials for a project. We had 30 managers, senior architects, tech leads, and software engineers working on the project.  Currently, I use the solution for my personal work.  The solution has good flexibility…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"We decided to work with MongoDB as its interface is easier to understand and more universal."
"The solution's most important aspect is its seamless database."
"It facilitates the generation of heatmaps for graphical data analysis."
"MongoDB is flexible and it allows other applications to be added."
"The solution is user-friendly with a good object retrieval feature."
"The most valuable feature of MongoDB is the ease of connections, aggregation, and queries."
"Migrating to MongoDB upgrades the IT environment and puts users in the NoSQL environment, which is faster."
"MongoDB has a simple data-loading interface."
 

Cons

"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."
"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."
"A normal Oracle or database tester will take some time to gear up to MongoDB because the way of writing queries is different in MongoDB. There should be some kind of midway where a person who is coming from an Oracle background can write a query and get a response by using something like a select * statement or other such things. There should be some way for MongoDB to interpret these commands rather than making a person learn MongoDB commands and writing them. I struggled while writing these MongoDB commands. I had not seen such queries before. It was pretty difficult to get them. This is one of the areas where it would help from the improvement standpoint."
"It could be much more flexible like SequoiaDB. I would like to see more flexibility in the next release, especially when working with Microsoft Windows. A lot of people struggle with MongoDB because of their Windows versions. But Linux is faultless and mostly runs nicely."
"I'd like to see an ID generator. It's very technical but I don't think it has one, so we have to go to great lengths to work around that."
"The on-premises version of the solution is still pretty expensive, especially compared to the cloud version."
"The free tools, like MongoDB Compass, could be enhanced."
"The improvements could be made to intelligence to detect disk storage and prevent MongoDB from crashing."
"The analytics needs improvement."
"MongoDB would be improved with more integration, particularly for cloud environments like Google BigQuery."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"There are different licenses available to be purchased, such as individual, premium, or enterprise."
"MongoDB is an open-source solution."
"We are using the Community Edition of MongoDB."
"The product is affordable."
"MongoDB is a free solution. We wanted to have high availability and the subscription cost was quite expensive because the basic one is free and then when you want to have some other replications or other features you will need to pay money. Overall the solution is expensive."
"It's a community edition, so we do not pay anything."
"Our customers pay for yearly licenses for MongoDB."
"MongoDB's pricing is not reasonable, but it is not as expensive as the others."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
University
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about MongoDB?
MongoDB's approach to handling data in documents rather than traditional tables has been particularly beneficial.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MongoDB?
MongoDB is free of charge. that said, there is also a paid version. We use both free and paid versions.
What needs improvement with MongoDB?
If something is wrong on the cluster, then you need to contact the support team. The stability could be better.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Milvus vs. MongoDB and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.