DBMS > Elasticsearch vs. Milvus

System Properties Comparison Elasticsearch vs. Milvus

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Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

A distributed, RESTful modern search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene

Elasticsearch lets you perform and combine many types of searches such as structured, unstructured, geo, and metric

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

Primary database model

Search engine
Vector DBMS

Vector DBMS

Secondary database models

Document store
Spatial DBMS

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

Score	123.81
Rank	#9	Overall
	#1	Search engines
	#1	Vector DBMS

Score	2.92
Rank	#87	Overall
	#7	Vector DBMS

Website

www.elastic.co/elasticsearch

milvus.io

Technical documentation

www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html

milvus.io/docs/overview.md

Developer

Elastic

Initial release

2010

2019

Current release

8.6, January 2023

2.4.4, May 2024

License

Commercial or Open Source

Open Source

Elastic License

Open Source

Apache Version 2.0

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.

Implementation language

Java

C++, Go

Server operating systems

All OS with a Java VM

Linux
macOS

10.14 or later
Windows

with WSL 2 enabled

Data scheme

schema-free

Flexible type definitions. Once a type is defined, it is persistent

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

Vector, Numeric and String

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 search fields are automatically indexed

SQL

Support of SQL

SQL-like query language

APIs and other access methods

Java API
RESTful HTTP/JSON API

RESTful HTTP API

Supported programming languages

.Net
Groovy
Community Contributed Clients
Java
JavaScript
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

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

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

Triggers

yes

by using the 'percolation' feature

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

ES-Hadoop Connector

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Eventual Consistency

Synchronous doc based replication. Get by ID may show delays up to 1 sec. Configurable write consistency: one, quorum, all

Bounded Staleness
Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency
Session Consistency
Tunable Consistency

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

Transaction concepts

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

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

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

Memcached and Redis integration

yes

User concepts

Access control

Role based access control and fine grained access rights

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More resources

DB-Engines blog posts

PostgreSQL is the DBMS of the Year 2017
2 January 2018, Paul Andlinger, Matthias Gelbmann

Elasticsearch moved into the top 10 most popular database management systems
3 July 2017, Matthias Gelbmann

MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis are the winners of the March ranking
2 March 2016, Paul Andlinger

show all

Vector databases
2 June 2023, Matthias Gelbmann

show all

Recent citations in the news

OpenSearch 3.0 hits: First major release under Linux Foundation as it battles ElasticSearch for mindshare
7 May 2025, devclass

OpenSearch 3.0 targets fast AI search with MCP and GPU-powered vectors
7 May 2025, Blocks and Files

OpenSearch in 2025: Much more than an Elasticsearch fork
28 April 2025, InfoWorld

Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Standard and Extended Support dates for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch versions
7 November 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Elasticsearch Now Available as a Native Grounding Engine on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform
9 April 2025, Business Wire

provided by Google News

What Is Milvus? A Distributed Vector Database
3 March 2025, Oracle

Milvus 2.5 Creates the Best of Both Worlds With Hybrid Vector-Keyword Search
17 December 2024, GlobeNewswire

AI-Powered Search Engine With Milvus Vector Database on Vultr
7 November 2024, SitePoint

Why Manual Sharding is a Bad Idea for Vector Database And How to Fix It | by Milvus | Apr, 2025
25 April 2025, DataDrivenInvestor

Dance between dense and sparse embeddings: Enabling Hybrid Search in LangChain-Milvus
19 November 2024, Towards Data Science

provided by Google News

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