Supabase Vector is not a separate product with its own storage engine — it is pgvector, the open-source Postgres extension, wrapped in Supabase's managed Postgres, dashboard, client libraries, and a set of automation primitives (triggers, queues, Edge Functions) that turn a generic SQL column into a working embeddings pipeline. That framing matters for what follows: every constraint discussed here is a Postgres extension constraint, not a purpose-built vector engine's constra

Milvus is an open-source, Apache 2.0-licensed vector database originally built by Zilliz, hosted under the LF AI & Data Foundation since January 2020 and holding graduate status since June 2021. It separates storage and compute into independently scalable services and ships in three forms: embedded (Milvus Lite, for local prototyping), standalone (single-node), and distributed cluster (multiple specialized node types behind a proxy layer). Zilliz also operates Zilliz Cloud, a