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Milvus vs MySQL comparison

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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
15th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (14th)
MySQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
152
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 4.6%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MySQL is 12.7%, up from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MySQL12.7%
Milvus4.6%
Other82.7%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Amandeep Pawar - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer Technology at Iris Software Technologies Private Limited
Careful data design has delivered consistent transactions and supports reliable microservices
MySQL is a reliable and mature relational database, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. One area is horizontal scalability. While MySQL supports scaling for applications, handling write-heavy workloads often requires additional solutions such as sharding, which adds complexity. Another area where it could improve is in native support for advanced analytics and large-scale distributed processing, which may require specialized databases. Changing the database schema on large tables can also be challenging and may require careful planning to minimize downtime. Performance tuning is powerful, but identifying and optimizing slow queries often requires manual analysis and experience. Having more built-in performance insights and automated optimization recommendations would be helpful for administrators. In terms of documentation and security, I think MySQL could be improved in those areas. While the official documentation is comprehensive, it can sometimes be difficult for beginners to navigate, especially for advanced topics such as application partitioning and query optimization. More practical examples and architecture-focused guides would be beneficial. On the integration side, MySQL already works well with frameworks such as Spring Boot and Hibernate, but enhancing support for modern cloud-native deployments, Kubernetes, and automated observability would simplify operations. MySQL is a mature and dependable database, and I hope to see improvements primarily around administration, better operational tooling, and a smoother developer experience rather than fundamental database capabilities.

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 well containerized, and since containerization is quick and easy for me, I can scale it up quickly."
"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"The best feature of Milvus was finding the closest chunk from a huge amount of data."
"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."
"It’s been used as the main databases for a lot of the developments we have done."
"However, the ability to scale horizontally is much better than other vendors."
"This database enabled us to web present our content in a cost efficient way."
"It has a relational database system."
"I believe that it is the ideal solution for a variety of projects with a small learning curve compared to other solutions."
"The most valuable feature of MySQL is its reliability and performance."
"It is a stable, reliable, and powerful solution that is quite suited for small to medium organizations and/or projects."
"The connectivity with PHP is quite good."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Customer Service: 4/10 Technical Support: 7/10"
"Clusters are hard to perform so we use no SQL alternates like MongoDB."
"MySQL's performance needs to be improved for enterprise-level applications compared to Oracle and Postgres."
"The GUI could improve to make MySQL better."
"It has a lot of options to interact with. Sometimes it is hard to find the appropriate options quickly."
"There are some issues with compatibility with Java environments that need to be improved. When Oracle bought this solution there were some driver changes that caused some issues with operations."
"MySQL is missing some RDBMS features like stored procedures, foreign keys, transaction, rollback, and subselect, and it also does not support triggers."
"We require more ease of use, scalability, and high availability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"It's cheaper than other solutions."
"There is not a license required for this solution."
"We are using the free community edition of MySQL."
"We are using the free community version of the solution."
"There is a licensing cost because we are going for a proprietary product. There are some other versions for which there is no licensing cost."
"There is a license needed for this solution."
"It is open source. We prefer it for POCs because it saves the license cost."
"I use a free version at present."
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Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business75
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise64
 

Questions from the Community

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Why are MySQL connections encrypted and what is the biggest benefit of this?
MySQL encrypts connections to protect your data and the biggest benefit from this is that nobody can corrupt it. If you move information over a network without encryption, you are endangering it, m...
Considering that there is a free version of MySQL, would you invest in one of the paid editions?
I may be considered a MySQL veteran since I have been using it since before Oracle bought it and created paid versions. So back in my day, it was all free, it was open-source and the best among sim...
What is one thing you would improve with MySQL?
One thing I would improve related to MySQL is not within the product itself, but with the guides to it. Before, when it was free, everyone was on their own, seeking tutorials and how-to videos onli...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Milvus vs. MySQL and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.