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Milvus vs PostgreSQL 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
Ranking in Vector Databases
12th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
1st
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
127
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 4.9%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 13.3%, down from 18.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL13.3%
Milvus4.9%
Other81.8%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Shobhit Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"The solution is well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"It is easy to use."
"If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift."
"PostgreSQL has offered similar performance for our workloads with lower cost."
"It's a standard reliable database management system."
"PostgreSQL makes it very adaptable to several descriptions of a record; instead of having several tables or several relations for one entity, I can adapt this entity, and this plasticity allows me to move it for every person that is inside the company."
"It's improved security by allowing us to switch from an unsecure file-based database to a secure SQL database without license payments."
"Besides the simple fact of being an open product that can be used at virtually no cost, the quality of the code base is extremely good."
"The PostgreSQL database is similar to the SQL Server but has a slightly different technology that has similar resources as well, and if the customer has the confidence using SQL Server, they will be fairly comfortable using this solution."
 

Cons

"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 could make it simpler. Simplifying the requirements and making it more accessible. It could be more user-friendly."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"Extensibility could be even better as there are still too many things that require programming in C to add to the database."
"The scalability is limited."
"PostgreSQL is pretty slow when dealing with queries like COUNT(*) and many of the queries like 'INSERT IGNORE', which inserts if a row doesn't exist, and 'REPLACE' which replaces the current row."
"Slow count. As the number of rows exceed a couple million, the count query and queries which get to the depth of the data (like FTS) start taking too much time even with all the right indexes in place."
"Also, it's only 7-8/10 when comparing it to an Oracle database."
"In future releases I would like to see built-in realization of multi-master cluster with sharding, effective partitioning, incremental backup, optimizations for SSD, connection pool facilities, and built-in replication for tables and databases."
"The solution needs to improve the query, documentation, and JSON data functionality."
"PostgreSQL doesn't have a feature for temporal SQL, which is useful for gathering versions of data. This feature should be included in PostgreSQL. This feature is available in MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle Database, and DB2."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"We are using the free version of PostgreSQL."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"It is free. In terms of operating costs, it basically needs the same platform on which Oracle runs."
"The community version of Postgre is basically free."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"It could be much cheaper. If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift. If you want other databases, you can add them, but PostgreSQL is the basis of everything. It's a question of money, that's it."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
"PostgreSQL is open-source, so if capable admins are available then the setup cost can be $0."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise47
 

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...
How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
I purchased from the marketplace, so licensing and pricing cost is acceptable. To be honest, there is a separate team who handles the cost of licensing everything. I have admin access on Azure and ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Milvus vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.