Who is Zilliz best for?

Zilliz is built for AI/ML engineers building RAG and LLM-powered applications, Enterprise data infrastructure and platform teams, Data scientists running large-scale embedding workloads, Developers prototyping or scaling semantic search products. Common use cases include Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for LLM-powered applications; Semantic and multimodal similarity search (text, image, video, audio); AI agent memory and knowledge grounding.

How is Zilliz priced?

Zilliz Cloud offers four tiers. Free: $0, 5 GB storage, up to 5 collections. Serverless (Standard): pay-as-you-go based on vCU consumption, starting from $0/month. Dedicated Standard: from $99/GB/month; Dedicated Enterprise: from $155/month with 99.95% SLA, RBAC, SSO, private networking, and 24/7 support. Business Critical: custom pricing with 99.99% SLA, CMEK, HIPAA eligibility, PITR, and priority support. BYOC: custom pricing for self-infrastructure deployments. Cluster pricing by type: Performance-optimized from $65/million vectors/month; Capacity-optimized from $20/million vectors/month; Tiered-storage from $7/million vectors/month. Annual commit plans offer additional credits. Available via AWS, GCP, and Azure Marketplaces for cloud-spend drawdown.

What are the alternatives to Zilliz?

Common Search & Vector Databases alternatives to Zilliz include Elastic, Meilisearch, Typesense, Algolia, Pinecone. See the full comparison hub at /verticals/search-vector-databases/compare.

What do users praise about Zilliz?

Users frequently praise: Blazing-fast vector retrieval (sub-100ms for millions of vectors); Ease of use and quick onboarding via SDKs; Comprehensive and clear documentation; Seamless integration with LangChain and OpenAI embeddings; Managed service eliminates infrastructure and ops burden; Pay-as-you-go pricing accessible to individual developers; Scalability from prototype to billions of vectors; Open-source Milvus foundation reduces vendor lock-in risk.

What are common complaints about Zilliz?

Frequently cited limitations: High cost for small or individual projects vs. self-hosting; Manual chunked uploads required for very large datasets; Some edge-case documentation gaps; Advanced enterprise features locked to top-tier plans.

When was Zilliz founded and where?

Zilliz was founded in 2017, headquartered in Redwood City, CA, USA by Charles Xie.

Zilliz reports 100-200 employees, 10,000+ enterprises customers.

AI visibility report

Zilliz ranks #8 in Search & Vector Databases AI search.

Outside the top three on 20 of the 25 prompts buyers actually ask.

Elastic is cited on 11 of those losses.

25 prompts

6 platforms

Updated Sep 4, 2026 - refreshed weekly

Track Zilliz daily

Free trial. Setup comes pre-filled for Zilliz.

Track Zilliz across these prompts daily.

Start free trial

7percent

Presence Rate

Low presence

#8 among 11 vendors · still absent from 93.3% of tracked prompt responses

Top-3 citations across 150 prompt × platform pairs

+0.16

Sentiment

-1.00.0+1.0

Neutral

#8of 11

Peer Ranking

#1#11

Below averagein Search & Vector Databases

Key Metrics

Presence Rate

6.7%

Share of Voice

5.2%

Avg Position

#37.7

Docs Presence

2.7%

Blog Presence

2.0%

Brand Mentions

17.3%

Platform Breakdown

Grok

24%6/25 prompts

ChatGPT

Research dossierCapabilities, use cases, sources, reviews, pricing, and FAQ

Overview

Zilliz is a US-based enterprise software company and the creator of Milvus, the world's most widely adopted open-source vector database with over 44,000 GitHub stars and 100 million+ downloads. Founded in 2017 by Charles Xie, Zilliz offers two primary products: the open-source Milvus for self-managed deployments, and Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed, multi-cloud vector database service built on Milvus. Zilliz Cloud is available on AWS, GCP, and Azure across 30+ regions, with deployment options spanning serverless, dedicated, and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) modes. The platform targets enterprises building AI applications requiring high-performance vector search at scale—from RAG pipelines and recommendation engines to fraud detection and drug discovery. Zilliz is named a Leader in the Forrester Wave Vector Database Providers Q3 2024 and serves 10,000+ enterprise customers.

AI visibility report

Zilliz ranks #8 in Search & Vector Databases AI search.

Outside the top three on 20 of the 25 prompts buyers actually ask.

Elastic is cited on 11 of those losses.

25 prompts

6 platforms

Updated Sep 4, 2026 - refreshed weekly

Track Zilliz daily

Free trial. Setup comes pre-filled for Zilliz.

Track Zilliz across these prompts daily.

Start free trial

7percent

Presence Rate

Low presence

#8 among 11 vendors · still absent from 93.3% of tracked prompt responses

Top-3 citations across 150 prompt × platform pairs

+0.16

Sentiment

-1.00.0+1.0

Neutral

#8of 11

Peer Ranking

#1#11

Below averagein Search & Vector Databases

Key Metrics

Presence Rate

6.7%

Share of Voice

5.2%

Avg Position

#37.7

Docs Presence

2.7%

Blog Presence

2.0%

Brand Mentions

17.3%

Platform Breakdown

Grok

24%6/25 prompts

ChatGPT

Research dossierCapabilities, use cases, sources, reviews, pricing, and FAQ

Overview

Reviews

4.7/5G2·53+

Praised

Blazing-fast vector retrieval (sub-100ms for millions of vectors)
Ease of use and quick onboarding via SDKs
Comprehensive and clear documentation
Seamless integration with LangChain and OpenAI embeddings
Managed service eliminates infrastructure and ops burden
Pay-as-you-go pricing accessible to individual developers
Scalability from prototype to billions of vectors
Open-source Milvus foundation reduces vendor lock-in risk

Criticized

High cost for small or individual projects vs. self-hosting
Manual chunked uploads required for very large datasets
Some edge-case documentation gaps
Advanced enterprise features locked to top-tier plans

Zilliz holds a 4.7/5 rating on G2 from 53 verified reviews (92% 5-star), recognized as both 'Highest Performer' and 'Easiest to Use' in G2's Summer 2025 Vector Database Grid Report. Users consistently praise blazing-fast query performance (sub-100ms for millions of vectors), ease of getting started via SDKs and documentation, seamless integration with LangChain and OpenAI embeddings, and the managed service's ability to eliminate infrastructure overhead. The most common criticism is cost at small or individual-project scale, where self-hosting is materially cheaper. Some users note friction with chunked large-file uploads.

Prompt	Bing Copilot	Gemini Search	ChatGPT	Google AI Mode	Perplexity	Grok
Capability2/5 cited (40%)
Which vector databases handle filtered similarity search efficiently — which ones support nearest neighbor search scoped to a specific user's namespace?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited

#	Brand	PresencePres.	Share of VoiceSoV	DocsDocs	BlogBlog	MentionsMent.	Avg PosPos	Sentiment
1	Elastic	17.3%	12.3%	9.3%	1.3%	28.0%	#17.9	+0.36
2	Meilisearch	14.7%	19.6%	8.0%	9.3%	28.7%	#28.7	+0.28
3	Typesense	13.3%	15.0%	10.7%	0.0%	29.3%	#31.4	+0.36
4	Algolia	12.7%	14.4%	8.7%	5.3%	30.0%	#30.1	+0.46
5	Pinecone	12.0%	8.4%	4.7%	4.0%	42.7%	#37.3	+0.33
6	Qdrant	11.3%	12.5%	8.0%	2.7%	43.3%	#36.8	+0.40
7	Weaviate	9.3%	6.8%	0.7%	2.7%	43.3%	#32.1	+0.42
8	Zilliz	6.7%	5.2%	2.7%	2.0%	17.3%	#37.7	+0.16
9	Vespa	5.3%	5.2%	3.3%	2.7%	4.7%	#32.6	+0.20
10	Chroma	1.3%	0.5%	0.7%	0.0%	10.0%	#45.0	+0.25
11	Trieve	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	—	—

Developer Experience1/5 cited (20%)
Which search platforms offer the best developer experience for combining keyword search with semantic vector search in a single query?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited

Integrations & Ecosystem3/5 cited (60%)
Which vector databases make it easiest to swap out the embedding model later without rebuilding the entire index — what should I evaluate for model portability?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited

Performance & Reliability2/5 cited (40%)
Which search platforms scale horizontally best when index size grows past what fits on a single node — what are the options?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited

Zilliz ranks #8 in Search & Vector Databases AI search.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Zilliz ranks #8 in Search & Vector Databases AI search.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Prompts where competitors are visible and Zilliz is not.

Where Zilliz is winning1

Where Zilliz is losing5

Key Facts

Key Capabilities10

Key Use Cases8

Zilliz customer outcomes

Recent Trend

How AI describes Zilliz3

Most cited sources8

Alternatives in Search & Vector Databases6

Reviews

Pricing

Limitations

Topic Coverage

Prompt-Level Results

Vertical Ranking

Turn this into your team dashboard

Frequently asked questions

Setup & First Run0/5 cited (0%)
Which hosted search platforms deliver good out-of-the-box relevance with minimal tuning before results feel useful to end users?	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	Neither your brand nor a competitor was cited	A competitor was cited

Zilliz ranks #8 in Search & Vector Databases AI search.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Zilliz ranks #8 in Search & Vector Databases AI search.

Key Metrics

Platform Breakdown

Overview

Prompts where competitors are visible and Zilliz is not.

Where Zilliz is winning1

Where Zilliz is losing5

Key Facts

Key Capabilities10

Key Use Cases8

Zilliz customer outcomes

Recent Trend

How AI describes Zilliz3

Most cited sources8

Alternatives in Search & Vector Databases6

Reviews

Pricing

Limitations

Topic Coverage

Prompt-Level Results

Vertical Ranking

Turn this into your team dashboard

Frequently asked questions

What does Zilliz do?

Who is Zilliz best for?

How is Zilliz priced?

What are the alternatives to Zilliz?

What do users praise about Zilliz?

What are common complaints about Zilliz?

When was Zilliz founded and where?

How big is Zilliz?