Milvus vs Quickwit
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted search engines options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Quickwit
Cloud-native search engine for logs and traces
| Feature | Milvus | Quickwit |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 100 · Excellent | 93 · Excellent |
| Category | Search Engines | Search Engines |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 4,096 MB | 1,024 MB |
| Deployment | docker, kubernetes, helm | docker, kubernetes, binary |
| GitHub stars | ★ 46,245 | ★ 11,670 |
| First released | 2019 | 2021 |
| Replaces | Pinecone, Elasticsearch | Splunk, Elasticsearch |
What are Milvus and Quickwit?
Milvus
Milvus is an open-source vector database designed for scalable similarity search and AI applications. It can manage billions of vectors and supports semantic search and recommendation use cases.
- Billion-scale vector search
- Multiple index types
- Cloud-native distributed architecture
- Hybrid search support
Quickwit
Quickwit is an open-source, cloud-native search engine optimized for log management, distributed tracing and analytics on large datasets stored in object storage. It is designed to be cost efficient at scale.
- Search directly on object storage
- Optimized for logs and traces
- Decoupled compute and storage
- Elasticsearch-compatible API
Milvus vs Quickwit: key differences
Milvus is written in Go, while Quickwit is built with Rust. Quickwit is the lighter option, starting around 1,024 MB of RAM against 4,096 MB for Milvus. Milvus is the more established project (first released 2019), while Quickwit arrived in 2021. Milvus has the considerably larger community, at 46,245 GitHub stars versus 11,670.
Why pick each one
Choose Milvus if…
- Scales to massive datasets
- Mature vector ecosystem
Watch out for
- Complex distributed deployment
Choose Quickwit if…
- Very cost effective at scale
- Modern Rust codebase
Watch out for
- Focused on append-only data
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Quickwit better?
Neither is universally better. Milvus has the larger community, while Quickwit is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Milvus and Quickwit free and open-source?
Yes. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Quickwit under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Milvus and Quickwit with Docker?
Milvus: yes. Quickwit: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Milvus or Quickwit?
Quickwit has the smaller minimum footprint at 1,024 MB of RAM, compared to about 4,096 MB for Milvus. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.