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Milvus vs MongoDB comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 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

Milvus
Ranking in Open Source Databases
10th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (8th)
MongoDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
NoSQL Databases (1st), Managed NoSQL Databases (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 5.8%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MongoDB is 3.6%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides quick and easy containerization, but documentation is not very user-friendly
Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly. Chroma DB provides super user-friendly documentation, enabling new users to get started quickly. Chroma DB's setup doesn't have many dependencies, whereas Milvus usually comes with some dependencies because of the way it needs to be deployed. Unlike Milvus, it's very easy to do POCs with Chroma DB.
Uzair Faruqi - PeerSpot reviewer
Transforms data flow with adaptable schema and smooth public cloud deployment
One of our business units uses MongoDB, and we developed an ETL pipeline that extracts data from MongoDB and transfers it into our data warehouse MongoDB is a NoSQL database that is similar to a document database. It offers flexibility in schema adaptation, allowing us to change the schema and…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"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."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
"MongoDB is a NoSQL tool that gives us much freedom to manipulate how the data works."
"The most valuable features of MongoDB are we have a lot of documentation and SQL-based applications that run on it."
"I find the integration with other tools very easy."
"It is really a pretty easy product to use. It's very reliable, it's proven."
"The aggregation framework is really good, allowing a developer to build very complex queries."
"It stores historical data with ease. For example, if you are a healthcare member, then you will have multiple records of visits to the doctors. To store such data in Oracle Database, you have to create many records. You might also have duplication problems because your records are going in again and again, because of which the data warehouse and the maintenance cost will be huge. MongoDB is comparatively lightweight. It is a JSON extract. Once you define a schema and extract it, you can push all the relationships in any way you want. It is easier to define and get different types of transactions into MongoDB. It is also easier to set it up as compared to other solutions. MongoDB is a NoSQL database, which means it is a document DB in which you can store documents that you created in BSON. It is pretty fast in response. It is faster than relational databases because it does not define any primary keys, secondary keys, tertiary keys, and all those kinds of things."
"My impression is that the initial setup is straightforward."
"The solution does not hold data in tabular format like SQL does but rather clusters data so that it can link on a large scale."
 

Cons

"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."
"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."
"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."
"The on-premises version of the solution is still pretty expensive, especially compared to the cloud version."
"More stable indexes would be helpful in a future release. That's been an issue for some time. I don't know if it's been fixed now but we transitioned to it because we needed a search index to be able to search for things and if that goes or starts disappearing, we have to move away from that solution. I don't know if they fixed it, last time I had this issue was three years ago so they might have solved it."
"The scalability of the product is acceptable, but with MongoDB, the big problem is the cost."
"MongoDB could improve by not having so many updates and different versions."
"I'd like to see an ID generator. It's very technical but I don't think it has one, so we have to go to great lengths to work around that."
"The performance of the solution could be improved."
"It isn't easy to recognize entities with MongoDB."
"The solution can be a bit tough to set up if you don't have knowledge about how the database works."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"I currently use the solution's community edition which is free."
"I believe that MongoDB is free."
"MongoDB is a bit expensive compared to its competitors."
"MongoDB has a free version. You can also buy the enterprise edition, which is cheaper than Oracle."
"MongoDB's pricing is reasonable."
"I chose MongoDB because it is cost-effective compared to Oracle, which can be expensive. In addition, MongoDB has good performance and has not caused any issues while working with it. It has been a good choice for me."
"It's a community edition, so we do not pay anything."
"MongoDB is a free solution. We wanted to have high availability and the subscription cost was quite expensive because the basic one is free and then when you want to have some other replications or other features you will need to pay money. Overall the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about MongoDB?
MongoDB's approach to handling data in documents rather than traditional tables has been particularly beneficial.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MongoDB?
We use the free version of MongoDB, so there are no licensing costs.
What needs improvement with MongoDB?
There is room for improvement in integrating MongoDB with agentive AI solutions. While solutions for other databases like SQL or PostgreSQL ( /products/postgresql-reviews ) already exist, MongoDB r...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Milvus vs. MongoDB and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.