Vector databases · Zilliz, Inc.

Zilliz Cloud

Fully managed cloud version of Milvus, built and operated by Milvus's original creators.

Visit Zilliz Cloud Alternatives

Zilliz Cloud is the fully managed vector database service built by Zilliz, the company that originally created Milvus and later donated it to the Linux Foundation. It runs the same core Milvus engine as a hosted service, removing the work of deploying and scaling Milvus clusters, indexing strategy tuning, and infrastructure operations. Zilliz Cloud offers serverless (pay-per-use) and dedicated cluster deployment options across AWS, GCP and Azure, and adds a management console, monitoring, backup and enterprise security features on top of open-source Milvus. It targets teams that want Milvus's large-scale approximate nearest-neighbor search capabilities without operating Kubernetes clusters themselves. Because Zilliz Cloud and self-hosted Milvus share the same underlying engine, teams can generally move between them, self-hosting for cost control or full infrastructure ownership and moving to Zilliz Cloud to reduce operational overhead.

At a glance

Vendor Zilliz, Inc.
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for Teams that want Milvus's large-scale vector search without operating the cluster themselves.

Pricing

Offers a free tier plus serverless and dedicated-cluster usage-based pricing; exact rate figures were not available on the page fetched.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Features

  • Fully managed Milvus engine
  • Serverless and dedicated cluster deployment options
  • Multi-cloud availability (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Management console and monitoring
  • Automated backups
  • Enterprise security and access control

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

Milvus Open-source vector database built for billion-scale similarity search, governed under the Linux Foundation. Pinecone Fully managed, cloud-only vector database for similarity search and retrieval-augmented generation at scale. Qdrant Open-source vector database written in Rust, focused on filtered similarity search with a free managed cloud tier. Weaviate Open-source vector database with built-in hybrid (vector + keyword) search, available self-hosted or as managed cloud.

Zilliz Cloud in the index now

Terms to know

Machine learning Building models that learn patterns from data to make predictions or decisions, rather than following hand-coded rules. Semantic search Search that matches results to a query's meaning rather than its exact keywords, using vector similarity between embeddings. Vector database A database optimized to store numeric embeddings and quickly find the ones most similar to a given query vector.

Related guides

How to choose a vector database Pick a vector database by deployment model, scale and search type, not by benchmark charts — most teams' real constraint is who runs the cluster.