Milvus

Milvus is an open-source vector search engine developed by Zilliz, based in China.

Users of Milvus like that it provides an open-source library for vector search. This is useful if you want to be part of an open-source community and potentially contribute back to the project.

A common complaint from users who tried Milvus is the difficulty in getting it to run, scale, and integrate with other systems reliably. Users who built production systems on Milvus 1.0 reported facing significant engineering challenges when Milvus 2.0 was released with breaking changes. For this reason, engineering teams should carefully evaluate the time and effort they are willing to spend on implementing and maintaining such a system.

Pinecone

Pinecone is a production-ready, fully managed vector database that makes it easy to build high-performance vector search applications. Users love the developer experience and not having to set up and manage infrastructure.

Pinecone does not host or run embeddings models. You need to run your embedding models and perform your transformations outside of Pinecone, and only then you can upload your embeddings into Pinecone.

Pinecone is cost-effective and provides great performance at scale. However, customers say developer experience is the biggest reason they chose Pinecone. The simple API, web console, and documentation make it easy and quick to deploy and manage the vector database.