Compare Tools
Pick a category, then select 2–3 tools to compare side by side.
Category
Select 2–3 tools to compare
ElasticsearchhybridFree (self-hosted, Elastic License v2 / SSPL)
MilvushybridFree (self-hosted, Apache 2.0)
Hybrid Search
Metadata Filtering
Multi Tenancy
Managed Embeddings
Mcp Server
Serverless
Pricing
Free (self-hosted, Elastic License v2 / SSPL)Elastic Cloud Hosted $99+/mo (Standard, Gold, Platinum, Enterprise)Elasticsearch Serverless (pay per use)
Free (self-hosted, Apache 2.0)Free Zilliz Cloud Serverless tier$126/GB/mo Standard Zilliz Cloud Dedicated$197/mo EnterpriseBusiness Critical
Open Source
Self-Hosted
SDK Languages
pythonjavascripttypescriptgojavarubyphpcsharprust
pythonjavascripttypescriptgojavacsharpruby
Frameworks
langchainllamaindexvercel-aihaystack
langchainllamaindexvercel-aihaystackdspy
Compliance
soc2hipaagdprpci-dssiso27001
soc2gdprhipaaiso27001
Best For
Hybrid search at scale on top of mature search infrastructure — combine BM25, ELSER sparse vectors, and dense vectors in one query
Billion-scale vector workloads with the widest selection of ANN index types — HNSW, IVF, DiskANN, SCANN, GPU indexes
Limitations
Heavier and more memory-hungry than purpose-built vector engines; license is no longer pure Apache 2.0; vector-only workloads are overserved by Elasticsearch's full feature surface
Self-hosted deployment is operationally complex (depends on etcd, MinIO, Pulsar/Kafka); no first-party MCP server yet; managed offering is through Zilliz, not Milvus directly
Supported Not supported Unverified