Every category where a model named Milvus for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Vector databases	Data platform	2%	6 of 24	37%	38	criticized challenger
NoSQL databases	Data platform	0%	50 of 72	100%	1	under 10 labels · led by MongoDB at 59%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Milvus yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Milvus across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	1	1	2	4
GPT-5.4 mini	0	3	0	0	3
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	1	0	4	5
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	1	1	3
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	0	2	1	3
Mistral Small	1	0	1	0	2
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	0	1	2	3
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	0	1	2
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	1	0	3	4
Kimi K2	0	3	0	0	3
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	2	2	0	4
MiniMax M2.5	0	2	0	1	3

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct16 labelsNone

Paraphrase11 labels1

Comparative18 labelsNone

Budget-constrained21 labelsNone

Scale-constrained20 labelsNone

Negative31 labels1not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative117 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 of the 2 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“If you need maximum control and scalability, choose Milvus.” Mistral Small · Vector databases · paraphrase prompt · first choice

“Choose `Milvus` if: You are building a multi-billion vector enterprise system with a dedicated infrastructure engineering team” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Vector databases · comparative prompt · alternative

“"We have massive scale (>50M vectors)" | Milvus | Designed specifically for enterprise-scale open-source management.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Vector databases · budget prompt · alternative

“Milvus is the go-to for massive scale, but not the simplest choice for a small, budget-constrained team.” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Vector databases · budget prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“What to Avoid (For Now)... Milvus / Vespa... generally overkill for mid-market requirements.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Vector databases · direct prompt · hard negative

“Weaviate, Milvus, Pinecone, and Qdrant are all losing adoption share to custom stacks and provider-native retrieval options.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Vector databases · negative prompt · soft negative

“Vector-only DBs such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus | When you also need SQL/JSON/transactions in the same system” Perplexity Sonar · Vector databases · negative prompt · soft negative

“Avoid self-hosting Milvus if you are a startup, a small team, or do not have dedicated Kubernetes/Platform engineers.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Vector databases · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Milvus, over the 117 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Milvus was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Pinecone110 of 11723Not in the top three

Weaviate107 of 1176Not in the top three

Qdrant100 of 11728Not in the top three

pgvector88 of 11739Not in the top three

Chroma56 of 1177Not in the top three

Zilliz Cloud23 of 1171Not in the top three

Elasticsearch18 of 1170Not in the top three

FAISS17 of 1170Not in the top three

LanceDB16 of 1170Not in the top three

Redis16 of 1170Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Milvus. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 95 of the 117 answers that named Milvus and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

firecrawl.dev57

encore.dev47

medium.com32

dev.to29

iternal.ai28

redis.io28

atlan.com25

actian.com24

g2.com22

marktechpost.com19

311 of the 311 domain citations in answers naming Milvus came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

firecrawl.dev/blog/best-vector-databases57

encore.dev/articles/best-vector-databases47

iternal.ai/insights/best-vector-databases-202628

atlan.com/know/top-vector-databases-enterprise-ai24

g2.com/articles/best-vector-databases22

marktechpost.com/2026/05/10/best-vector-databases-in-2026-pricing-scale-limits-and-archite19

actian.com/blog/databases/how-to-evaluate-vector-databases-in-202618

redis.io/blog/best-open-source-vector-databases-comparison16

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Milvus

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Milvus; a claim can dispute any of them.

Milvus (Zilliz Cloud) 1Milvus (or Zilliz Cloud) 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Milvus's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Milvus, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at milvus.io is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.