Open Source Alternatives
Open source alternatives to Milvus
Open source alternatives to Milvus, ranked by GitHub stars and freshness.
16 open-source alternatives in the index, ranked by GitHub stars and freshness.
Qdrant
Community
Qdrant - High-performance, massive-scale Vector Database and Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/
Alternative to Milvus, Weaviate, Chroma +1 more
Best for: Builders needing fast, scalable vector search for embeddings in production AI systems
Chroma
Community
Search infrastructure for AI
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate +1 more
Best for: Developers building RAG systems and semantic search features who want a straightforward, open-source vector store
pgvector
Community
Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate +1 more
Best for: Teams already using Postgres who want vector search without adding infrastructure
Weaviate
Community
Weaviate is an open-source vector database that stores both objects and vectors, allowing for the combination of vector search with structured filtering with the fault tolerance an
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma +1 more
Best for: Teams building production search systems who need open-source control and can manage infrastructure.
Lancedb
Community
Developer-friendly OSS embedded retrieval library for multimodal AI. Search More; Manage Less.
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma +2 more
Best for: Developers who need a lightweight, embedded retrieval library for multimodal AI experiments and edge deployments
deeplake
Community
Deeplake is AI Data Runtime for Agents. It provides serverless postgres with a multimodal datalake, enabling scalable retrieval and training.
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma
Best for: Developers building AI agents that need a unified, scalable datalake for retrieval and training
Marqo
Community
Ecommerce Search and Discovery - marqo.ai
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate
Best for: Ecommerce teams who need a search engine with integrated observability for product discovery
Vearch
Community
Distributed vector search for AI-native applications
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate +2 more
Best for: Engineering teams seeking a lightweight, open-source vector search for observability workflows
Vald
Community
Vald. A Highly Scalable Distributed Vector Search Engine
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate
Best for: Engineering teams needing a scalable, self-hosted vector search engine for observability workloads
ArcadeData/arcadedb
Various
ArcadeDB Multi-Model Database, one DBMS that supports SQL, Cypher, Gremlin, HTTP/JSON, MongoDB and Redis. ArcadeDB is a conceptual fork of OrientDB, the first Multi-Model DBMS. Arc
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant
Best for: Developers who need a flexible multi-model database with vector capabilities and want to avoid managing separate systems
VectorDB
Community
A Python vector database you just need - no more, no less.
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma +2 more
Best for: Developers needing a lightweight vector store for small-scale observability experiments or prototyping
AquilaDB
Community
An easy to use Neural Search Engine. Index latent vectors along with JSON metadata and do efficient k-NN search.
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate +2 more
Best for: Developers needing quick vector search with JSON metadata for small to medium datasets.
Statewave
Community
Open-source memory runtime for AI agents — reproducible, provenance-tagged context bundles instead of query-time retrieval. Apache-2.0, self-hosted on Postgres + pgvector, Python +
Alternative to Chroma, Milvus, Weaviate
Best for: Developers who need reproducible memory for AI agents
Awadb
Community
AI Native database for embedding vectors
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma +2 more
Best for: Developers needing a lightweight and performant vector database for small to mid scale projects
Pinecone
Community
Search through billions of items for similar matches to any object, in milliseconds. It’s the next generation of search, an API call away.
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Chroma +2 more
Best for: Teams needing fast, scalable vector search for observability or similarity matching workloads
Rivestack
Community
Managed pgvector on dedicated PostgreSQL with NVMe storage. 2,000 QPS at sub-4ms p50, from $35/month, migration help from Supabase, Neon, Pinecone, and self-hosted.
Alternative to Milvus, Qdrant, Weaviate +1 more
Best for: Teams needing a dedicated, high-performance managed pgvector database for production vector search and retrieval-augmented generation workloads.