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CrateDB vs Milvus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

CrateDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
21st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Milvus
Ranking in Open Source Databases
9th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of CrateDB is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 5.3%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Milvus5.3%
CrateDB0.9%
Other93.8%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

FC
product owner at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Data platform has delivered real-time casino gameplay insights but still needs broader expertise
The best features CrateDB offers in my experience include many functionalities that allow you to purge data, maintain data, keep the database clean and essentially updated. CrateDB also allows us to store many records, and I think the performance is very strong compared to other databases or technologies. CrateDB's performance stood out for me as it allowed me to query results in less than seconds, which was optimal and enabled real-time analytics. I found it to be a very distributed SQL engine, which was beneficial considering our specific requirements. It supports multi-model and flexible schemas for structured and semi-structured data, JSON, time series for loads, and BLOBs, along with integrated performance improvements and faster ingestion than what I recall from other databases, plus better query optimizations. CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day. Positively, we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day, and we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years."
"CrateDB positively impacted my organization by reducing the time needed for processes, and its impressive scalability made it easy to start with one server and then horizontally scale to multiple nodes to retrieve data, which helped my company gain more customers."
"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."
"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."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
 

Cons

"One area for improvement in CrateDB could be the command line interface, as sometimes it was not very easy to understand."
"CrateDB can be improved as it is not very popular, which means there are not many people dedicated or experienced with this particular technology, making it less usable or suitable for many companies."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrateDB?
We were happy with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of CrateDB, and I do not have any complaints. Everything was great.
What needs improvement with CrateDB?
One area for improvement in CrateDB could be the command line interface, as sometimes it was not very easy to understand. However, if you are technically adept, it was not a tough challenge; it was...
What is your primary use case for CrateDB?
At my previous company, which was a security analytics tool, my main use case for CrateDB was to ingest any kind of logs from email, applications, firewalls, DNS, Microsoft, and other technology to...
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

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 Oracle, PostgreSQL, Firebird and others in Open Source Databases. Updated: January 2026.
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