Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Milvus vs PostgreSQL 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
9th
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
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
7.7
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 5.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 18.4%, down from 21.4% 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.
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."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"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 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."
"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."
"With the database, you can provide a multi-component at the same service with the same performance, scalability, or all those things."
"The product's deployment is easy."
"It has completely met our needs. It works, and it is robust. We haven't had any problems with what PostgreSQL does for us and the way it does it. That's why we've been using it for so long. We understand it, and it does the job."
"What I like is that it's quite powerful in terms of performance."
"It is easy to use."
"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."
 

Cons

"Milvus could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."
"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."
"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."
"A better graphic user-interface would be nice to see."
"The performance of PostgreSQL could improve."
"They need to have a better graphical interface. There is a tool called pgAdmin 4 that they use, which is free. It is written in Java, and it is slow. They need to have a better product that is similar to Toad for Oracle, but, of course, it is hard to get something that's really great and free. Other than that, it is great."
"I'm not really able to customize it."
"Sometimes, the views create problems. If you don't have the view, sometimes what happens is you need to have the drivers properly set up for PostgreSQL."
"I find it difficult to get connectors on the tool. For example, .NET has only one free provider in PostgreSQL. I need to pay the provider if I need something more sophisticated features. Other languages like PHP and Java have good community support. We need community support for .NET."
"Instead of the installation agent downloading all the packages for the install, it should allow the user to download the packages separately on their own to do the install."
"I have noticed that user and access management should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"The licensing model is good."
"PostgreSQL is open-source, so if capable admins are available then the setup cost can be $0."
"It is also open-source so it is free."
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."
"This solution can offer a cheaper choice for customers since it is open-source."
"It could be much cheaper. If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift. If you want other databases, you can add them, but PostgreSQL is the basis of everything. It's a question of money, that's it."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Open Source Databases solutions are best for your needs.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
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

 

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
1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg
Find out what your peers are saying about Milvus vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.