Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

txtai VS Milvus

Compare txtai VS Milvus and see what are their differences

txtai logo txtai

AI-powered search engine

Milvus logo Milvus

Vector database built for scalable similarity search Open-source, highly scalable, and blazing fast.
  • txtai Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-02
  • Milvus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-01

Milvus is a highly flexible, reliable, and blazing-fast cloud-native, open-source vector database. It powers embedding similarity search and AI applications and strives to make vector databases accessible to every organization. Milvus can store, index, and manage a billion+ embedding vectors generated by deep neural networks and other machine learning (ML) models. This level of scale is vital to handling the volumes of unstructured data generated to help organizations to analyze and act on it to provide better service, reduce fraud, avoid downtime, and make decisions faster.

Milvus is a graduated-stage project of the LF AI & Data Foundation.

txtai features and specs

  • Open Source
    txtai is open-source, which allows users to freely access, modify, and distribute the code, fostering collaboration and innovation within the community.
  • Ease of Use
    The library provides a simple API that makes it easy to integrate into existing projects, making it accessible for users with varying levels of technical expertise.
  • Versatile Functionality
    txtai supports a wide range of NLP tasks including embeddings, search, question-answering, and translation, providing users with a comprehensive suite of tools.
  • Scalability
    Designed to handle large datasets efficiently, txtai can scale its operations to suit both small projects and enterprise-level applications.
  • Active Development
    The project is actively maintained and regularly updated, ensuring compatibility with the latest advancements in NLP technology.

Possible disadvantages of txtai

  • Limited Documentation
    While the library is feature-rich, the documentation can be sparse in some areas, making it challenging for new users to fully leverage its capabilities.
  • Dependency Management
    txtai relies on various third-party libraries which may lead to dependency conflicts and require careful management during installation and updates.
  • Performance Overhead
    For certain applications, the library might introduce performance overhead due to its abstraction layers, particularly when using complex models not optimized for specific tasks.
  • Learning Curve
    New users or those unfamiliar with NLP concepts might face a steep learning curve to implement advanced functionality effectively.
  • Community Size
    Although growing, the community around txtai is not as large as some other NLP libraries, which might affect the availability of community support and shared resources.

Milvus features and specs

  • High Performance
    Milvus is designed to manage and process large-scale vector data extremely fast, making it suitable for handling real-time processing of massive datasets.
  • Scalability
    Milvus supports horizontal scaling, ensuring that as the data grows, the system can scale out by adding more nodes to maintain performance.
  • Flexible Deployment
    Milvus can be deployed on-premises, on cloud services, or in hybrid environments, providing flexibility for different infrastructure needs.
  • Community and Support
    As an open-source project, Milvus has a strong community and support network, including comprehensive documentation and active community forums.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    Milvus integrates well with various machine learning and data processing tools, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and other AI frameworks, facilitating seamless workflows.
  • Built-in Indexing
    Milvus provides built-in indexing capabilities like IVF, HNSW, and ANNOY, which enhance the speed and efficiency of similarity searches on vector data.

txtai videos

Introducing txtai

More videos:

  • Review - Dive Into TxtAI Engine of NLP WorkFlows: Building Pipelines, Workflow & RDBMS For Embedding vectors.

Milvus videos

End to End Tutorial on Milvus Lite

More videos:

  • Demo - An Introduction To the Milvus Open Source Vector Database

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to txtai and Milvus)
Search Engine
39 39%
61% 61
Databases
37 37%
63% 63
Custom Search Engine
34 34%
66% 66
Utilities
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, txtai should be more popular than Milvus. It has been mentiond 76 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

txtai mentions (76)

  • Analyzing LinkedIn Company Posts with Graphs and Agents
    Txtai is an all-in-one embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Lists of open-source frameworks for building RAG applications
    Ideal For: Projects requiring quick setup and robust search capabilities. GitHub Repository. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Show HN: I made a website to semantically search ArXiv papers
    Excellent project. As mentioned in another comment, I've put together an embeddings database using the arxiv dataset (https://huggingface.co/NeuML/txtai-arxiv) recently. For those interested in the literature search space, a couple other projects I've worked on that may be of interest. Annotateai (https://github.com/neuml/annotateai) - Semantic search and workflows for medical/scientific papers. Built on txtai... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Building Effective "Agents"
    If you're looking for a lightweight open-source framework designed to handle the patterns mentioned in this article: https://github.com/neuml/txtai Disclaimer: I'm the author of the framework. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Postgres for Everything (E/Postgres)
    I fully agree. Postgres has solved many of the problems that many are re-solving with GenAI related databases. With txtai (https://github.com/neuml/txtai), I've went all in with Postgres + pgvector. Projects can start small with a SQLite backend then switch the persistence to Postgres. With this, you get all the years of battle-tested production experience from Postgres... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
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Milvus mentions (38)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing txtai and Milvus, you can also consider the following products

Weaviate - Welcome to Weaviate

Vespa.ai - Store, search, rank and organize big data

Qdrant - Qdrant is a high-performance, massive-scale Vector Database for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/

TopK.io - TopK is a cloud-native database intended for search use cases. It comes with keyword search, vector search, and metadata filtering built-in. Easy-to-use search engine loved by developers of all skill levels.

Zilliz - Data Infrastructure for AI Made Easy

Meilisearch - Ultra relevant, instant, and typo-tolerant full-text search API