Milvus

Milvus is an open-source vector database for storing and searching embeddings. It is developed as an open-source project in the milvus-io repository, which was created on GitHub in 2019, and is licensed under Apache-2.0, an open-source licence. Organisations can run it on their own infrastructure at no licence cost. Zilliz sells the commercial managed service, Zilliz Cloud, for teams that prefer not to operate the database themselves. The latest release is v3.0.2, published on 20 September 2026, which belongs to the 3.x major line. Because that is a major version, anyone upgrading from an earlier line should read the project's release notes before moving production data. The project itself is free to self-host, so costs arise only from the infrastructure it runs on or from a Zilliz Cloud subscription. Milvus suits teams building applications that need similarity search over embeddings and that want to keep the option of running the engine in their own environment, while still having a commercial hosted route if they later want one. The repository shows the project as active.