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 Weaviate
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 Weaviate if teams who will stay on Cloud Free $0 (100k objects, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB disk) or self-host, then buy Flex at $45/month when they need HA, 1,000 collections, and pay-as-you-go dimensions.
Milvus
self-hosted vector Data Explorer
Best for
Milvus A collection table you start at a public $
Weaviate Vectors you can self-host or rent from $45 Flex
Free plan
Milvus $0 · apache-2.0. Self-host (Docker / K8s / binary). Attu admin UI is Apache-2.0 at zilliztech/attu
Weaviate $0 · forever. 1 cluster / user. 100,000 objects. 1 GB memory. 10 GB disk. 1 collection, up to 3 tenants. Embeddings 2,000 req/day. Query Agent 1,000 req/month. Best-effort SLA
Lowest paid
Milvus Not published by the vendor
Weaviate Premium Shared / Dedicated $0.003875/mo
Next step up
Milvus
Weaviate Embeddings (list) $0.025
Coding agent
Milvus Agent + Tab inside the editor
Weaviate Query Agent
Runs where
Milvus Local or hosted
Weaviate Local; you host it
Watch out
Milvus OSS is ops you run
Weaviate Free is 100k objects and one collection
Last checked
Milvus 2026-10-23 · zilliz.com/pricing
Weaviate 2026-10-22 · weaviate.io/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Weaviate if
teams who will stay on Cloud Free $0 (100k objects, 1 GB RAM, 10 GB disk) or self-host, then buy Flex at $45/month when they need HA, 1,000 collections, and pay-as-you-go dimensions.
Read the Weaviate page