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Milvus vs Percona Server 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
14th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (14th)
Percona Server
Ranking in Open Source Databases
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 4.7%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Percona Server is 2.4%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Percona Server2.4%
Milvus4.7%
Other92.9%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Sameer Bhangale - PeerSpot reviewer
Leader, Data Science Practice at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
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.
Pieter Geelen - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelancer at geelen.io
Reliable open-source database has supported our migration and improved e-commerce performance
Percona Server seems great to me overall. If I had to think of any small area for improvement for Percona Server, it would be around the proxy story. When adding a proxy to manage traffic better, we first tried SQL Proxy, but it never really worked for us, which was unfortunate because SQL Proxy offers better optimizations for read performance. We did have success with HAProxy, but it works on a network level, while SQL Proxy was designed to be SQL-aware and distribute parts of the query across the database cluster. The performance gain we were hoping for with SQL Proxy did not materialize, so we remained on the network level with HAProxy. Databases can be finicky regarding the performance they need. We had some disk I/O latency issues, which led us to use different types of nodes in our Kubernetes cluster where we provisioned Percona Server explicitly. There is a lot of IOPS happening under the hood, and while I suspect the application was not very efficient, it was also challenging to identify that we were experiencing performance issues due to disk performance. It would be helpful to clarify the metrics related to disk I/O latency so we could understand where our bottlenecks are.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I like the accuracy and usability."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"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."
"Percona Server has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to save a ton of money by not having to use RDS or Aurora in Amazon, which is the public cloud that we are in."
"After switching to Percona Server, we were able to resolve those issues quickly."
"Percona Server's performance when handling large data sets was significant compared to regular MySQL, and it was excellent."
"Percona Server's scalability is very strong, as it features thread pooling for over 10,000 connections, scales out horizontally, and comes with XtraDB Cluster and ProxySQL, making it very effective."
"Percona Server has positively impacted my organization because it is open source, and if the official MongoDB goes in different directions or makes its product expensive, we can still use Percona Server, which serves as a sort of safety net."
"Percona Server has positively impacted my organization primarily by helping with uptime a lot, as I support a lot of applications and a lot of servers, and it ensures that our services are well monitored."
"Percona Server has positively impacted my organization by reducing downtime for applications and improving backup capabilities."
"In my use of Percona Server, I've found that the replication and High Availability features are the most valuable."
 

Cons

"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."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"If Percona had flashback capabilities, it would be ideal."
"I would like to add that the user interface is very crowded, which makes it challenging for new engineers to know where to turn, so I had to sit down and understand the documentation before I was able to manage the application myself."
"I also think there should be more use cases and documentation on deploying in Kubernetes with real-life examples, as currently, the documentation is minimal, making it difficult in a production situation."
"Percona Server can be improved by addressing the lag between releasing new versions of MySQL and its Percona support, and also by enhancing the configuration of performance variables to provide more user-friendly and easier to configure options."
"If I had to think of any small area for improvement for Percona Server, it would be around the proxy story."
"It doesn't reclaim disk space when rows are deleted."
"Percona Server could be improved to keep pace with other flavors of MySQL, such as MariaDB, and could pivot to be Percona Server for MariaDB given Oracle's reduced investment in MySQL recently."
"Percona Server could be improved by adding more advanced query fields, which would be very helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Comms Service Provider
24%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

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 advice do you have for others considering Milvus?
Milvus works well for various use cases and is quite flexible in terms of deployment. For on-premises deployment, you can use the open-source version with Docker. The system requirements are relati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Percona Server?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I know that it was not my position to pay for that or negotiate, but we received the enterprise features for free, and I am not aware of the licensing ...
What needs improvement with Percona Server?
To improve Percona Server, I recommend more marketing because many people in the MySQL world know it, but there is a need to let others know that instead of MySQL, they can use Percona Server to en...
What is your primary use case for Percona Server?
Percona Server serves as our main database server handling user information, real-time GPS coordinates at a 30-second interval, and functions as our GIS database, reporting database, and secondary ...
 

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
Pricefalls Marketplace, Micpoint, Rent the Runway, Transmart, Wattpad, Singular Group, Invoca, 3E
Find out what your peers are saying about Milvus vs. Percona Server and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,647 professionals have used our research since 2012.