Pick Milvus if
search / RAG teams who will stay on the OSS binary at $0 while they open a first Data Explorer, then buy Zilliz Cloud when they want a hosted SLA — not a second self-hosted vector DB.
Read the Milvus pageMilvus vs Qdrant
Our take
Pick Milvus if search / RAG teams who will stay on the OSS binary at $0 while they open a first Data Explorer, then buy Zilliz Cloud when they want a hosted SLA — not a second self-hosted vector DB. Pick Qdrant if rAG teams who will run OSS or Cloud Free for $0 (1 GB / 4 GB, ~1M × 768-d vectors) and only open Standard when they need dedicated RAM and a 99.5% SLA.
Milvus
self-hosted vector Data Explorer
Best for
Milvus A collection table you start at a public $
Qdrant Store and search embeddings you already made
Free plan
Milvus $0 · apache-2.0. Self-host (Docker / K8s / binary). Attu admin UI is Apache-2.0 at zilliztech/attu
Qdrant $0 · you host Docker / Kubernetes / Edge
Lowest paid
Milvus Not published by the vendor
Qdrant Cloud Standard $85/mo
Coding agent
Milvus Agent + Tab inside the editor
Qdrant
Runs where
Milvus Local or hosted
Qdrant
Watch out
Milvus OSS is ops you run
Qdrant Free Cloud suspends after 1 idle week
Last checked
Milvus 2026-10-23 · zilliz.com/pricing
Qdrant 2026-10-22 · qdrant.tech/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Qdrant if
rAG teams who will run OSS or Cloud Free for $0 (1 GB / 4 GB, ~1M × 768-d vectors) and only open Standard when they need dedicated RAM and a 99.5% SLA.
Read the Qdrant page