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Milvus vs PostgreSQL comparison

 

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
9th
Ranking in Vector Databases
13th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
5
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
7.3
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of Milvus is 5.1%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 14.4%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL14.4%
Milvus5.1%
Other80.5%
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.
Ece Ece - PeerSpot reviewer
Software developer at Student
Reliable transactions and rich features have powered real time collaboration and faster development
PostgreSQL fully supports ACID transactions, including atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, which are some of the best features it offers in my experience. It also supports multiple index types, such as B-tree, Gin, Gist, and BRIN, and provides JSON and JSONB support, which is used to query semi-structured data. PostgreSQL uses Multi-Version Concurrency Control, which allows multiple users to read and write simultaneously. For extensibility, PostgreSQL allows extensions such as PostGIS and pg_trgm, which are truly useful. PostgreSQL improves reliability, performance, and scalability in production. Since it is ACID compliant, it ensures that database transactions are safe and consistent, preventing partial data updates, maintaining data integrity, and allowing multiple users to read or write data simultaneously using MVCC. Features such as foreign keys, constraints, and triggers impact data consistency by preventing invalid data. It supports read replicas, partitioning, and horizontal scaling for scalability. PostgreSQL has been very stable in my experience, handling concurrent requests reliably while maintaining data consistency with ACID transactions and accommodating concurrent users with strong data integrity, making it mature and widely used in production systems. Using PostgreSQL with Prisma allows faster development because schema migrations are automated and type-safe queries reduce the time I spend fixing database bugs, allowing me to focus more on building features while improving collaboration between developers due to a well-defined relational schema. Migration tools keep everyone's database schema synchronized, which allows multiple developers to work on backend features without conflicts. It has a rich feature set, supporting advanced features such as window functions, common table expressions (CTEs), and full-text search, with the flexibility of supporting both JSON and relational data, meaning it can behave as both a relational database and a document database. Extensibility allows PostgreSQL to add new capabilities while maintaining a strong ecosystem that integrates easily with modern backend stacks such as Node.js, Docker, and Prisma.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Milvus has good accuracy and performance."
"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 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 product is easy to use and works fast for relational databases."
"The database has excellent performance."
"It's a useful solution, that can be widely used."
"The solution is quite stable."
"It is easy to use."
"We often use PostgreSQL for operations monitoring because we are a manufacturing company."
"PostgreSQL is stable. It's available, stable, and reliable."
"It is a pretty comprehensive database system. Its performance is good, and it does what it is supposed to do. It also integrates very well."
 

Cons

"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."
"Milvus' documentation is not very user-friendly and doesn't help me get started quickly."
"PostgreSQL could improve by providing a geographical solution for tracking trucks and people in the field. They might already have features similar to this and I have not found them. I haven't done research about this topic."
"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 would be great if the solution offered even more integration capabilities."
"Sometimes, the views create problems. If you don't have the view, sometimes what happens is you need to have the drivers properly set up for PostgreSQL."
"It is possible that in the newer version this has been addressed, but I would like the deployment in microservices architecture could be improved."
"They need to improve the user experience of the management."
"I find it difficult to get connectors on the tool. For example, .NET has only one free provider in PostgreSQL. I need to pay the provider if I need something more sophisticated features. Other languages like PHP and Java have good community support. We need community support for .NET."
"There could be a plugin to distribute the data on servers for the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"Milvus is an open-source solution."
"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 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."
"We do not pay for licensing."
"It is open-source. If you use it on-premise, it is free. It also has enterprise or commercial versions. If you go for the cloud version, there will be a cost, but it is lower than Oracle or Microsoft."
"The community version of Postgre is basically free."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"It is free. In terms of operating costs, it basically needs the same platform on which Oracle runs."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise46
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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 do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Milvus vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.