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Elastic Search vs Milvus comparison

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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 (8th), 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 (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of Elastic Search is 5.5%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Milvus is 7.2%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Search5.5%
Milvus7.2%
Other87.3%
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

"The solution is quite scalable and this is one of its advantages."
"The best feature of Elastic Search that I appreciate is its monitoring capability."
"This has improved our organization because we articulated Kubernetes, Docker, and GitHub with amazing simplicity in the scaling up of our service."
"The solution has great scalability."
"It helps us to analyse the logs based on the location, user, and other log parameters."
"Elastic Search is very user-friendly, and we can easily integrate it with third-party models and other AWS S3 buckets."
"The dashboard is a valuable feature - it's awesome and very customizable."
"I think that Elasticsearch is a good product and cheaper than Splunk."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"I know many customers who lost their data and could not recover it."
"There are challenges with performance management and scalability."
"To do what we want to do with Elastic Search, the queries can get complex and require a fuller understanding of the DSL."
"Scalability and ROI are the areas they have to improve."
"The upgrade experience and inflexibility with fields keeps Elastic Search from being a perfect 10."
"In Elastic Search, the improvements I would like to see require many resources."
"I have not been using the solution for many years to know exactly the improvements needed. However, they could simplify how the YML files have to be structured properly."
"More AI would be beneficial. I would also appreciate more simplicity in dashboards."
"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 tool is not expensive. Its licensing costs are yearly."
"we are using a licensed version of the product."
"The pricing model is questionable and needs to be addressed because when you would like to have the security they charge per machine."
"The solution is not expensive because users have the option of choosing the managed or the subscription model."
"The price of Elastic Enterprise is very, very competitive."
"Although the ELK Elasticsearch software is open-source, we buy the hardware."
"We are using the open-sourced version."
"The pricing structure depends on the scalability steps."
"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%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

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...
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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: September 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.