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Elastic Search vs Milvus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Elastic Search
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Indexing and Search (1st), Cloud Data Integration (5th), Search as a Service (1st)
Milvus
Ranking in Vector Databases
14th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.1%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 7.0%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search5.1%
Milvus7.0%
Other87.9%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2817942 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Logging and vector search have transformed observability and empowered reliable ai agents
Elastic Search is not specifically being used for certain purposes. I deploy Elastic Search database on the cloud and use cloud services so that nobody can attack. However, I do not use Elastic Search to resolve attack issues. The basic main purpose of Elastic Search, as of now, I feel it can do more in the AI area. Sometime I saw that when I am developing RAG and have to generate the embeddings, which I call metadata, sometimes it tries to fail. That durability or issue handling should be improved, but apart from that, I did not find anything as of now. As per my use case, whatever I am using seems pretty good. Apart from that, some definitely improvement will be there. One improvement is that it should be faster. Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time. For example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second. With Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds. That can be improved. Sometimes, engineers take time to assign when I create a ticket.
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

"Data indexing of historical data is the most beneficial feature of the product."
"A positive feature of ELK is that it directly interacts with Elasticsearch, the UI is very nice, and performance wise it's quite good too."
"Elastic Search, being a vector database, quickly indexes data, allowing for searches based on text and data directly, which I found fascinating."
"You have dashboards, it is visual, there are maps, you can create canvases. It's more visual than anything that I've ever used."
"The solution is very good with no issues or glitches."
"Using real-time search functionality to support operational decisions has been helpful."
"This product has notably improved the way we store and use logs, from having a more user-friendly, centralized solution (for those who just needed a quick glance, without being masters of sed and awk) to implementing various mechanisms for machine-learning from our logs, and sending alerts for anomalies."
"In summary, Elasticsearch is a very useful product that I can quickly recommend."
"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."
"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 best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more integration for the solution with different platforms."
"I see that there are areas in Elastic Search that have room for improvement, such as user documentation and onboarding processes."
"I think the first area for improvement is pricing, as the cluster cost for Elastic Search is too high for me."
"Whenever I am searching any logs, it takes much time; for example, if I open my log in Notepad or a similar tool, I can search the text within a second, but with Elastic Search, it takes a little bit of time, ten to fifteen seconds."
"Regarding what I dislike about Elastic Search, there is one issue that occurs because Elastic Search is not my primary database; it serves as a substitute database for the searching part."
"The documentation regarding customization could be better."
"I think the pricing of Elastic Search is really, really expensive."
"The metadata gets stored along with indexes and isn't queryable."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The basic license is free, but it comes with a lot of features that aren't free. With a gold license, we get active directory integration. With a platinum license, we get alerting."
"We are using the free open-sourced version of this solution."
"An X-Pack license is more affordable than Splunk."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The solution is affordable."
"The tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"Elastic Search is open-source, but you need to pay for support, which is expensive."
"This is a free, open source software (FOSS) tool, which means no cost on the front-end. There are no free lunches in this world though. Technical skill to implement and support are costly on the back-end with ELK, whether you train/hire internally or go for premium services from Elastic."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise50
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ELK Elasticsearch?
The pricing for Elastic Search is mainly budgeted according to the organization budget, so we take it as a yearly subscription, and that is acceptable since we do get a fair discount when we are ta...
What needs improvement with ELK Elasticsearch?
When we get the logs, it is mostly about how we edit the configurations and how we make changes according to the requirements of our organization. In these cases, the logs sometimes can be a bit in...
What is your primary use case for ELK Elasticsearch?
I am the Elastic Search admin for my organization, and we are using Elastic Search to handle the traffic to GCP. The monitoring of all the clusters and all the deployments are quite good, and compa...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Elastic Enterprise Search, Swiftype, Elastic Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

T-Mobile, Adobe, Booking.com, BMW, Telegraph Media Group, Cisco, Karbon, Deezer, NORBr, Labelbox, Fingerprint, Relativity, NHS Hospital, Met Office, Proximus, Go1, Mentat, Bluestone Analytics, Humanz, Hutch, Auchan, Sitecore, Linklaters, Socren, Infotrack, Pfizer, Engadget, Airbus, Grab, Vimeo, Ticketmaster, Asana, Twilio, Blizzard, Comcast, RWE and many others.
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 Elastic Search vs. Milvus and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.