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Milvus vs PostgreSQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Milvus
Ranking in Open Source Databases
10th
Ranking in Vector Databases
7th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
2nd
Ranking in Vector Databases
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
AdityaSharma3 - PeerSpot reviewer
Transaction processes are fast and good replication capability
Use cases include querying data warehouses and databases to fetch data for clients already working on PostgreSQL.  We also use Postgres for building reports It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping. The query speed is fast, and the…

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 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."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"The system can perform faster analysis by providing it with a lot of memory. Speed is crucial for analytics. Currently, the main reason we haven't adopted Elasticsearch is that we lack the necessary expertise to manage it."
"The main value is that it is open source, which means it is free. Our organization has the initiative to go to open source to cut down on cost. Oracle costs us $6 million a year right now, which is killing us, and Postgres costs nothing. So, there is a big push to go to Postgres."
"The solution provides complete support in terms of the SQL dialect and behaves nicely when it comes to transactions."
"Postgres is rock solid when deployed according to best practices as documented by the PostgreSQL community. When it's installed correctly, PostgreSQL is an enterprise-grade solution."
"PostgreSQL makes it very adaptable to several descriptions of a record. Instead of having several tables or several relations for one entity, I can adapt this entity. It can be a multiform entity. For example, here in Mexico, a company and a person can be sold to us as a physical entity or a physical person."
"The solution is scalable, it is very good."
"This is an open-source solution, operates at a high speed, and supports more than one SQL language."
"Initial setup is simple."
 

Cons

"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."
"It still needs to be more mature and have some backup feature. We are normally dealing with Oracle's data, and we have very strong online tools to back up the data and do other things. PostgreSQL still needs to do more in this area as well as in the high availability area. There are many external tools that you can use for PostgreSQL's high availability, but there is no embedded tool within PostgreSQL for high availability. It could have a feature similar to Oracle for working on a distributed system. It can have some scripts to improve the monitoring and some tools to do performance analysis. We have a workaround for most of such requirements except for the support for a distributed system, which is very difficult to have. This area should be included in the core of the database itself."
"It needs more integration."
"When you get a large number of records in a database and start doing various queries, it can adversely impact the performance of the live running systems. That's an area we continue to look at and mean to improve, but it is not only because of PostgreSQL. It is also because of the way the schemas are put together, and certain events are triggered. So, it is because of both parties."
"Postgres should focus on building a stronger knowledge base. They also need to expand their integration capabilities, so more tools and resources are available to manage it."
"As PostgreSQL is an open-source product, you do have to do a bit more configuration and management yourself."
"PostgreSQL uses high memory compared to its counterparts when a highly demanding load is involved, especially one that makes many concurrent connections to the database."
"They need to improve the user experience of the management."
"PostgreSQL could improve by adding data warehousing tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Affordable solution."
"We do not pay for licensing."
"It is free, but if you need support, you can go for the commercial version called EnterpriseDB. They provide paid support, and they can even do hosting for you if you want standby and support."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"It is open-source. If you use it on-premise, it is free. It also has enterprise or commercial versions. If you go for the cloud version, there will be a cost, but it is lower than Oracle or Microsoft."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"This solution can offer a cheaper choice for customers since it is open-source."
"It is free. In terms of operating costs, it basically needs the same platform on which Oracle runs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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...
How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

Comparisons

 

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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. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.