DBMS > ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. Lovefield vs. Milvus vs. Weaviate

System Properties Comparison ClickHouse vs. Couchbase vs. Lovefield vs. Milvus vs. Weaviate

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A high-performance, column-oriented SQL DBMS for online analytical processing (OLAP) that uses all available system resources to their full potential to process each analytical query as fast as possible. It is available as both an open-source software and a cloud offering.

A distributed document store with integrated cache, a powerful search engine, in-built operational and analytical capabilities, and an embedded mobile database

Embeddable relational database for web apps written in pure JavaScript

A DBMS designed for efficient storage of vector data and vector similarity searches

An AI-native realtime vector database engine that integrates scalable machine learning models.

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Time Series DBMS

Key-value store

originating from the former Membase product and supporting the Memcached protocol
Spatial DBMS

using the Geocouch extension
Search engine
Time Series DBMS
Vector DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	15.55
Rank	#38	Overall
	#23	Relational DBMS

Score	16.59
Rank	#36	Overall
	#5	Document stores

Score	0.33
Rank	#286	Overall
	#131	Relational DBMS

Score	2.78
Rank	#103	Overall
	#4	Vector DBMS

Score	1.52
Rank	#153	Overall
	#6	Vector DBMS

Website

clickhouse.com

www.couchbase.com

google.github.io/lovefield

milvus.io

github.com/weaviate/weaviate
weaviate.io

Technical documentation

clickhouse.com/docs

docs.couchbase.com

github.com/google/lovefield/blob/master/docs/spec_index.md

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

weaviate.io/developers/weaviate

Developer

Clickhouse Inc.

Couchbase, Inc.

Google

Weaviate B.V.

Initial release

2016

2011

2014

2019

Current release

v24.4.1.2088-stable, May 2024

Server: 7.2, June 2023; Mobile: 3.1, March 2022; Couchbase Capella (DBaaS), June 2023

2.1.12, February 2017

2.4.4, May 2024

1.19, May 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Business Source License (BSL 1.1); Commercial licenses also available

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

Open Source

commercial license available with Weaviate Enterprise

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

ClickHouse Cloud: Get the performance you love from open source ClickHouse in a serverless offering that takes care of the details so you can spend more time getting insight out of the fastest database on earth.
Aiven for Clickhouse: Managed cloud data warehousing with high-speed analytics.
DoubleCloud: Fully managed ClickHouse alongside best-in-class managed open-source services to build analytics at scale.

Zilliz Cloud – Cloud-native service for Milvus

Implementation language

C++

C, C++, Go and Erlang

JavaScript

C++, Go

Server operating systems

FreeBSD
Linux
macOS

Linux
OS X
Windows

server-less, requires a JavaScript environment (browser, Node.js)

tested with Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

yes, maps to GraphQL interface

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

yes

string, int, float, geo point, date, cross reference, fuzzy references

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

Secondary indexes

yes

all data objects are indexed in a semantic vector space (the Contextionary), all primitive fields are indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

Close to ANSI SQL (SQL/JSON + extensions)

SQL++, extends ANSI SQL to JSON for operational, transactional, and analytic use cases

SQL-like query language

via JavaScript builder pattern

GraphQL is used as query language

APIs and other access methods

gRPC
HTTP REST
JDBC
MySQL wire protocol
ODBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Proprietary protocol

CLI Client
HTTP REST
Kafka Connector
Native language bindings for CRUD, Query, Search and Analytics APIs
Spark Connector
Spring Data

RESTful HTTP API

GraphQL query language
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

Supported programming languages

3rd party library
C++
Elixir

3rd party library
Go

3rd party library
Java

3rd party library
JavaScript (Node.js)

3rd party library
Kotlin

3rd party library
Nim

3rd party library
Perl

3rd party library
PHP

3rd party library
Python

3rd party library
R

3rd party library
Ruby

3rd party library
Rust
Scala

3rd party library

.Net
C
Go
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Kotlin
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

JavaScript

C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

JavaScript / TypeScript
Python

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Functions and timers in JavaScript and UDFs in Java, Python, SQL++

Triggers

yes

via the TAP protocol

Using read-only observers

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

key based and custom

Automatic Sharding

none

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Asynchronous and synchronous physical replication; geographically distributed replicas; support for object storages.

Multi-source replication

including cross data center replication
Source-replica replication

none

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

selectable on a per-operation basis

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Eventual Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

yes, by using IndexedDB or the cloud service Firebase Realtime Database

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

Ephemeral buckets

yes

using MemoryDB

yes

User concepts

Access control

Access rights for users and roles. Column and row based policies. Quotas and resource limits. Pluggable authentication with LDAP and Kerberos. Password based, X.509 certificate, and SSH key authentication.

User and Administrator separation with password-based and LDAP integrated Authentication. Role-base access control.

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

API Keys
OpenID Connect Discovery

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Milvus is an open-source and cloud-native vector database built for production-ready...
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Weaviate is an open source vector database that is robust, scalable, cloud-native,...
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Competitive advantages

Highly available, versatile, and robust with millisecond latency. Supports batch...
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Flexible deployment - Free, open source or fully-managed cloud vector database service...
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Typical application scenarios

RAG: retrieval augmented generation Video media : video understanding, video deduplication....
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As a database supporting the development of generative AI and semantic search applications...
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Key customers

Milvus is trusted by thousands of enterprises, including PayPal, eBay, IKEA, LINE,...
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All companies that have data.
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Market metrics

As of January 2024, 25k+ GitHub stars 10M+ downloads and installations 3k+ enterprise...
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As of mid 2023: Over 2 million open source downloads 3500+ Weaviate Slack community...
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Licensing and pricing models

Milvus was released under the open-source Apache License 2.0 in October 2019. Fully-managed...
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Weaviate is open-source, and free to use. Weaviate is also available as a fully managed...
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