Milvus

Milvus is the vector database you reach for when your dataset outgrows everything else. Built for billions of vectors with a distributed architecture that separates storage, compute, and metadata — it scales horizontally where most alternatives hit a wall.

Pinecone is the managed alternative — dead simple but locks you into their cloud and pricing. Weaviate blends vector search with structured data nicely. Qdrant is the lean, Rust-based option gaining fast momentum. For most indie projects, pgvector or Chroma will get you started without a new database.

Use Milvus if you're building production RAG or search at serious scale and want to self-host. Benchmarks show sub-10ms p50 latency at high throughput.

The catch: operational complexity is real. Running a Milvus cluster means managing etcd, MinIO, and Pulsar dependencies. For a solo founder prototyping an AI feature, this is overkill. Start with pgvector, graduate to Milvus when your vector count demands it.