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Elastic Search vs Milvus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 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

Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
Milvus
Ranking in Vector Databases
12th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 4.5%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 6.9%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search4.5%
Milvus6.9%
Other88.6%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.
reviewer2395743 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helps convert text and other data into a vector space but could provide detailed insights
Milvus is an open-source vector database designed for efficiently handling large-scale, high-dimensional data. It supports various types of data sources and can be deployed on your own premises, which is crucial for maintaining data security. 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. Milvus also includes its own user interface, known as the Milvus Dashboard, which allows you to visualize and manage your data, including embeddings and metadata. You can filter your data based on various criteria, including metadata and file names, which provides flexibility in data management.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I appreciate the indexing capabilities and the speed of indexing in their product, which demonstrates how quickly logs are collected and stored."
"The security portion of Elasticsearch is particularly beneficial, allowing me to view and analyze security alerts."
"The observability is the best available because it provides granular insights that identify reasons for defects."
"I have found the sort capability of Elastic very useful for allowing us to find the information we need very quickly."
"Elastic Search is very quick when handling a large volume of data."
"On the subject of pricing, Elastic Search is very cost-efficient, as you can host it on-premises, which would incur zero cost, or take it as a SaaS-based service, where the expenses remain minimal."
"I would say that Elasticsearch is better than all the other solutions."
"A good use case is saving metadata of your systems for data cataloging. Various systems, like those opened in metadata and similar applications, use Elasticsearch to store their text data."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"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."
 

Cons

"Kibana should be more friendly, especially when building dashboards."
"Elastic Enterprise Search could improve its SSL integration easier. We should not need to go to the back-end servers to do configuration, we should be able to do it on the GUI."
"There is an index issue in which the data starts to crash as it increases."
"It would be useful to include an assistant into Kibana for recommendations, advice, tutorials, or things that can help improve my daily work with Elastic Search."
"In terms of product improvement, ratio aggregation is not supported in this solution."
"We had initially planned to expand use of ELK because of its cheap price and the services that are included, but given the difficulty with implementation we've decided to go with Nagios instead."
"They should improve its documentation. Their official documentation is not very informative."
"The pricing of this product needs to be more clear because I cannot understand it when I review the website."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"To access all the features available you require both the open source license and the production license."
"The solution is less expensive than Stackdriver and Grafana."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"The tool is an open-source product."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"We use the free version for some logs, but not extensive use."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise47
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
When it comes to pricing, I think we had to pay AWS approximately 1,000 to 1,200 per month for the overall stack. I am not quite certain about how much Elastic Search costs specifically because I w...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
Elastic Search has many features, including Kibana and Logstash, which we regularly use. However, one downside in our product is cost, as it can be expensive when maintaining multiple shards and in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
As a developer, I use Elastic Search in developing one of my applications, basically integrating the back-end with Elastic Search. Our main use case for Elastic Search is for Logstash, which is a s...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Search vs. Milvus and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.