Zilliz Cloud
activeby Zilliz · since 2022 · also known as Zilliz
Fully managed Milvus from its creators, with serverless, dedicated and BYOC deployments.
Overview
Zilliz Cloud is the commercial managed service from Zilliz, the company behind most Milvus development. It exposes the Milvus API but runs Zilliz's proprietary Cardinal search engine and tiered storage, and offers Free, Serverless (pay per use), Dedicated and BYOC options across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Extras over open-source Milvus include automatic index tuning, data migration and import pipelines, backups, RBAC, audit logs and CMEK on Business Critical. Choose it if you want Milvus scale without running etcd, Pulsar/Woodpecker and object storage yourself.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- +Milvus-compatible API, so you can move between self-hosted and managed
- +Cardinal engine and AutoIndex reduce manual index tuning
- +Serverless tier for spiky or small workloads
- +Available on all three hyperscalers plus BYOC
- +Enterprise controls: SSO, audit logs, CMEK, HIPAA eligibility
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary engine means performance differs from open-source Milvus
- −Pricing units (vCU/CU) take effort to model
- −Cloud-only unless you negotiate BYOC
- −Same strict-schema modeling as Milvus
Great for
- +Production RAG without running Milvus
- +Large-scale semantic and image search
- +Multi-tenant AI SaaS backends
Think twice for
- −Air-gapped on-prem without BYOC
- −Relational or transactional data
- −Tiny hobby projects with strict cost caps
Capabilities
Native or official first-party support · 11 of 25 tracked
Scale & consistency
- Comfortable data size
- Massive · Multi-PB
- Horizontal scaling
- Native
- Multi-region
- No
- Transactions
- None
- Consistency
- Tunable, Strong, Eventual
- Schema
- Strict
- Architecture
- Distributed, Serverless, Shared storage
- Query languages
- Milvus API (boolean filter expressions)
Dedicated clusters scale query and storage capacity independently; tiered storage keeps cold vectors on object storage.
Deployment
available on · AWS · Google Cloud · Azure
Ecosystem
Alternatives to Zilliz Cloud
Cloud-native, distributed open-source vector database built for billions of vectors.
zilliz-cloud vs milvus →Fully managed serverless vector database with built-in embedding, reranking and assistants.
zilliz-cloud vs pinecone →Rust vector search engine with rich payload filtering, quantization and a managed cloud.
zilliz-cloud vs qdrant →Open-source AI-native vector database with hybrid search, modules for embeddings and multi-tenancy.
zilliz-cloud vs weaviate →Serverless vector and full-text search on object storage, priced for billions of documents.
zilliz-cloud vs turbopuffer →Google Cloud's managed ANN service built on ScaNN, now part of Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
zilliz-cloud vs vertex-ai-vector-search →Zilliz Cloud FAQ
What is Zilliz Cloud?
Zilliz Cloud is a vector database by Zilliz, first released in 2022. Zilliz Cloud is the commercial managed service from Zilliz, the company behind most Milvus development. It exposes the Milvus API but runs Zilliz's proprietary Cardinal search engine and tiered storage, and offers Free, Serverless (pay per use), Dedicated and BYOC options across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Extras over open-source Milvus include automatic index tuning, data migration and import pipelines, backups, RBAC, audit logs and CMEK on Business Critical. Choose it if you want Milvus scale without running etcd, Pulsar/Woodpecker and object storage yourself.
Is Zilliz Cloud open source?
No. Zilliz Cloud is proprietary, closed-source software.
Does Zilliz Cloud support ACID transactions?
No. Zilliz Cloud does not provide ACID transactions; its consistency model is tunable, strong, eventual.
Does Zilliz Cloud scale horizontally?
Zilliz Cloud scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at massive scale (Multi-PB).
How can I run Zilliz Cloud?
You can use the vendor's managed cloud and run it serverless. It is available on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.
What is Zilliz Cloud best for?
Zilliz Cloud is a strong fit for production RAG without running Milvus; large-scale semantic and image search; and multi-tenant AI SaaS backends. Think twice for air-gapped on-prem without BYOC.
What are the best alternatives to Zilliz Cloud?
Common alternatives to Zilliz Cloud include Milvus, Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate and turbopuffer. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.
How popular is Zilliz Cloud?
Zilliz Cloud ranks #656 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (0.4/100), and #30 among vector databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.