Milvus vs PostgreSQL comparison

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Milvus

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

PostgreSQL and Milvus are competitors in data management. PostgreSQL is favored for its extensive relational database features, while Milvus is recognized for its advanced vector database capabilities, ideal for AI and machine learning applications.

Features: PostgreSQL provides robust query processing, strong data integrity, and a wide array of data types suitable for various applications. Milvus specializes in handling unstructured data, ensures efficient similarity searches, and supports scalable vector operations, crucial for high-dimensional data integrations in AI training models.

Room for Improvement: PostgreSQL could enhance its vector processing capabilities to better compete in AI and machine learning environments. Its document storage could be more robust. Milvus might develop broader relational database functionalities and improve documentation to facilitate smoother deployment. Additionally, Milvus can enhance its community support to match the level of PostgreSQL.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PostgreSQL offers a traditional deployment model with thorough documentation, benefiting from extensive industry experience and strong community support. Milvus provides innovative containerized deployment strategies focusing on flexibility, supported by bespoke assistance for its unique features.

Pricing and ROI: PostgreSQL, being open-source, has low setup costs, making it versatile and cost-effective without license fees. Milvus is also open-source, minimizing initial costs but possibly requiring higher operational expenses due to specialized hardware needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Milvus vs. PostgreSQL Report (Updated: May 2026).

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Milvus vs. PostgreSQL

May 2026

Helped 900,644 peers since 2012

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

11th

Ranking in Vector Databases

11th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

PostgreSQL

Ranking in Open Source Databases

2nd

Ranking in Vector Databases

8th

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 June 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 4.8%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 13.1%, down from 18.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
PostgreSQL	13.1%
Milvus	4.8%
Other	82.1%

Open Source Databases

Featured Reviews

reviewer2395743

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.

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Shobhit Goel

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"I like the accuracy and usability."

"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."

"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."

"It has completely met our needs. It works, and it is robust."

"PostgreSQL is an amazing product, very stable, predictable and reliable with rich set of features."

"PostgreSQL is one of the most stable data sources out there, and it offers you the most advance and modern functions on SQL so you can do more with less."

"The product's deployment is easy."

"Updatable views (also over multiple tables), array and JSON fields, and point-in-time backup and recovery (WAL files archiving) are very useful features."

"It has allowed us to run a Scada database, which reads data every 2 minutes, and it does this in a very smooth way."

"The solution is quite a good database for light applications for sure."

"Overall, I have only praise for the solution."

Cons

"I've heard that when we store too much data in Milvus, it becomes slow and does not work properly."

"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."

"Milvus has higher resource consumption, which introduces complexity in implementation."

"There are some products out there that have a slightly different method of implementation for the SQL language. Some of those are slightly better in some areas, and PostgreSQL is slightly better in some areas. I would probably like to match all of those products together. It is just down to the functionality. For example, Oracle has a number of options within SQL that are outside of what you would class as the SQL standard. PostgreSQL misses some of those, but PostgreSQL does other things that are better than what Oracle does. I would like to merge those two products so that there is a certain amount of functionality in a single product."

"It lacks the ability to distribute queries across multiple installations out of the box."

"I'd like to see the following improvements: Streaming replication (or similar) disconnected from the version, so we can use it for upgrades (i.e., a 9.3 version master and a 9.5 slave)."

"Sometimes it hangs and then we need to stop and start the services again"

"Extensibility could be even better as there are still too many things that require programming in C to add to the database."

"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."

"When you get a large number of records in a database and start doing various queries, it can adversely impact the performance of the live running systems. That's an area we continue to look at and mean to improve, but it is not only because of PostgreSQL. It is also because of the way the schemas are put together, and certain events are triggered. So, it is because of both parties."

"It would be good to have machine learning functionality in this solution, similar to Microsoft SQL Server and other solutions. Machine learning capability for a basic level or a common user would be useful. It can also have good reporting capabilities."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."

"The community version of Postgre is basically free."

"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."

"It is free, but if you need support, you can go for the commercial version called EnterpriseDB. They provide paid support, and they can even do hosting for you if you want standby and support."

"It is an open-source platform."

"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."

"The solution requires a license."

"We are using the free version of PostgreSQL."

"It is also open-source so it is free."

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	57
Midsize Enterprise	27
Large Enterprise	48

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...

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 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 ...

What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?

The only thing for PG vector is if the dimension limit could be increased. Currently, the dimension limit is around 1,000 to 1,052. If I need to increase the dimension to 3,000 or 5,000, that optio...

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Product Reports

Download Milvus product report

Open Source Databases

June 2026

Download PostgreSQL product report

June 2026

Overview

Milvus is a powerful tool for efficiently storing and retrieving large-scale vectors or embeddings. It is widely used in applications such as similarity search, recommendation systems, image and video retrieval, and natural language processing.

With its fast and accurate search capabilities, scalability, and support for multiple programming languages, Milvus is suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Users appreciate its efficient search capabilities, ability to handle large-scale data, support for various data types, and user-friendly interface.

Milvus enables easy retrieval of information from vast datasets, regardless of the data format, and is praised for its high performance and scalability. The intuitive and easy-to-use interface is also highlighted as a valuable aspect of the platform.

The Milvus Project

PostgreSQL is a versatile and reliable database management system commonly used for web development, data analysis, and building scalable databases.

It offers advanced features like indexing, replication, and transaction management. Users appreciate its flexibility, performance, and ability to handle large amounts of data efficiently. Its robustness, scalability, and support for complex queries make it highly valuable.

Additionally, PostgreSQL's extensibility, flexibility, community support, and frequent updates contribute to its ongoing improvement and stability.

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

1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg