Milvus vs Qdrant MCP Server

What is Milvus?

🐦 Milvus is a high-performance vector database built for scale. It powers AI applications by efficiently organizing and searching vast amounts of unstructured data, such as text, images, and multi-modal information.

🧑‍💻 Written in Go and C++, Milvus implements hardware acceleration for CPU/GPU to achieve best-in-class vector search performance. Thanks to its fully-distributed and K8s-native architecture, Milvus can scale horizontally, handle tens of thousands of search queries on billions of vectors, and keep data fresh with real-time streaming updates. Milvus also supports Standalone mode for single machine deployment. Milvus Lite is a lightweight version good for quickstart in python with pip install.

Want to use Milvus with zero setup? Try out Zilliz Cloud ☁️ for free. Milvus is available as a fully managed service on Zilliz Cloud, with Serverless, Dedicated and BYOC options available.

For questions about how to use Milvus, join the community on Discord to get help. For reporting problems, file bugs and feature requests in GitHub Issues or ask in Discussions.

The Milvus open-source project is
under LF AI & Data Foundation, distributed with Apache 2.0 License, with Zilliz as its major contributor.

Quickstart

$ pip install -U pymilvus

This installs pymilvus, the Python SDK for Milvus. Use MilvusClient to create a client:

from pymilvus import MilvusClient

• You can also try Milvus Lite for quickstart by installing pymilvus[milvus-lite]. To create a local vector database, simply instantiate a client with a local file name for persisting data:

  client = MilvusClient("milvus_demo.db")
  

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• You can also specify the credentials to connect to your deployed Milvus server or Zilliz Cloud:

  client = MilvusClient(
    uri="<endpoint_of_self_hosted_milvus_or_zilliz_cloud>",
    token="<username_and_password_or_zilliz_cloud_api_key>")
  

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With the client, you can create collection:

client.create_collection(
    collection_name="demo_collection",
    dimension=768,  # The vectors we will use in this demo have 768 dimensions
)

Ingest data:

res = client.insert(collection_name="demo_collection", data=data)

Perform vector search:

query_vectors = embedding_fn.encode_queries(["Who is Alan Turing?", "What is AI?"])
res = client.search(
    collection_name="demo_collection",  # target collection
    data=query_vectors,  # a list of one or more query vectors, supports batch
    limit=2,  # how many results to return (topK)
    output_fields=["vector", "text", "subject"],  # what fields to return
)

Why Milvus

Milvus is designed to handle vector search at scale. It stores vectors, which are learned representations of unstructured data, together with other scalar data types such as integers, strings, and JSON objects. Users can conduct efficient vector search with metadata filtering or hybrid search. Here are why developers choose Milvus as the vector database for AI applications:

High Performance at Scale and High Availability

• Milvus features a distributed architecture that separates compute and storage. Milvus can horizontally scale and adapt to diverse traffic patterns, achieving optimal performance by independently increasing query nodes for read-heavy workload and data node for write-heavy workload. The stateless microservices on K8s allow quick recovery from failure, ensuring high availability. The support for replicas further enhances fault tolerance and throughput by loading data segments on multiple query nodes. See benchmark for performance comparison.

Support for Various Vector Index Types and Hardware Acceleration

• Milvus separates the system and core vector search engine, allowing it to support all major vector index types that are optimized for different scenarios, including HNSW, IVF, FLAT (brute-force), SCANN, and DiskANN, with quantization-based variations and mmap. Milvus optimizes vector search for advanced features such as metadata filtering and range search. Additionally, Milvus implements hardware acceleration to enhance vector search performance and supports GPU indexing, such as NVIDIA's CAGRA.

Flexible Multi-tenancy and Hot/Cold Storage

• Milvus supports multi-tenancy through isolation at database, collection, partition, or partition key level. The flexible strategies allow a single cluster to handle hundreds to millions of tenants, also ensures optimized search performance and flexible access control. Milvus enhances cost-effectiveness with hot/cold storage. Frequently accessed hot data can be stored in memory or on SSDs for better performance, while less-accessed cold data is kept on slower, cost-effective storage. This mechanism can significantly reduce costs while maintaining high performance for critical tasks.

Sparse Vector for Full Text Search and Hybrid Search

• In addition to semantic search through dense vector, Milvus also natively supports full text search with BM25 as well as learned sparse embeddings such as SPLADE and BGE-M3. Users can store sparse vectors and dense vectors in the same collection, and define functions to rerank results from multiple search requests. See examples of Hybrid Search with semantic search + full text search.

Data Security and Fine-grain Access Control

• Milvus ensures data security by implementing mandatory user authentication, TLS encryption, and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). User authentication ensures that only authorized users with valid credentials can access the database, while TLS encryption secures all communications within the network. Additionally, RBAC allows for fine-grained access control by assigning specific permissions to users based on their roles. These features make Milvus a robust and secure choice for enterprise applications, protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access and potential breaches.

Milvus is trusted by AI developers to build applications such as text and image search, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and recommendation systems. Milvus powers many mission-critical businesses for startups and enterprises.

Demos and Tutorials

Here is a selection of demos and tutorials to show how to build various types of AI applications made with Milvus:

You can explore a comprehensive Tutorials Overview covering topics such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Semantic Search, Hybrid Search, Question Answering, Recommendation Systems, and various quick-start guides. These resources are designed to help you get started quickly and efficiently.

Image Search	RAG	Drug Discovery

Ecosystem and Integration

Milvus integrates with a comprehensive suite of AI development tools, such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI and HuggingFace, making it an ideal vector store for GenAI applications such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Milvus works with both open-source embedding models and embedding services, in text, image and video modalities. Milvus also provides a convenient utility pymilvus[model], users can use the simple wrapper code to transform unstructured data into vector embeddings and leverage reranking models for optimized search results. The Milvus ecosystem also includes Attu for GUI-based administration, Birdwatcher for system debugging, Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring, Milvus CDC for data synchronization, VTS for data migration and data connectors for Spark, Kafka, Fivetran, and Airbyte to build search pipelines.

Check out https://milvus.io/docs/integrations_overview.md for more details.

Documentation

For guidance on installation, usage, deployment, and administration, check out Milvus Docs. For technical milestones and enhancement proposals, check out issues on GitHub.

Contributing

The Milvus open-source project accepts contributions from everyone. See Guidelines for Contributing for details on submitting patches and the development workflow. See our community repository to learn about project governance and access more community resources.

Build Milvus from Source Code

Requirements:

• Linux systems (Ubuntu 20.04 or later recommended):

  Go: >= 1.21
  CMake: >= 3.26.4 && CMake < 4
  GCC: >= 11
  Python: > 3.8 and  <= 3.11
  

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• MacOS systems with x86_64 (Big Sur 11.5 or later recommended):

  Go: >= 1.21
  CMake: >= 3.26.4 && CMake < 4
  llvm: >= 15
  Python: > 3.8 and  <= 3.11
  

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• MacOS systems with Apple Silicon (Monterey 12.0.1 or later recommended):

  Go: >= 1.21 (Arch=ARM64)
  CMake: >= 3.26.4 && CMake < 4
  llvm: >= 15
  Python: > 3.8 and  <= 3.11
  

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Clone Milvus repo and build.

## Clone github repository.
$ git clone https://github.com/milvus-io/milvus.git

## Install third-party dependencies.
$ cd milvus/
$ ./scripts/install_deps.sh

## Compile Milvus.
$ make

For full instructions, see developer's documentation.

Community

Join the Milvus community on Discord to share your suggestions, advice, and questions with our engineering team.

To learn the latest news about Milvus, follow us on social media:

• X
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Medium

You can also check out our FAQ page to discover solutions or answers to your issues or questions, and subscribe to Milvus mailing lists:

• Technical Steering Committee
• Technical Discussions
• Announcement

Reference

Reference to cite when you use Milvus in a research paper:

@inproceedings{2021milvus,
  title={Milvus: A Purpose-Built Vector Data Management System},
  author={Wang, Jianguo and Yi, Xiaomeng and Guo, Rentong and Jin, Hai and Xu, Peng and Li, Shengjun and Wang, Xiangyu and Guo, Xiangzhou and Li, Chengming and Xu, Xiaohai and others},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data},
  pages={2614--2627},
  year={2021}
}

@article{2022manu,
  title={Manu: a cloud native vector database management system},
  author={Guo, Rentong and Luan, Xiaofan and Xiang, Long and Yan, Xiao and Yi, Xiaomeng and Luo, Jigao and Cheng, Qianya and Xu, Weizhi and Luo, Jiarui and Liu, Frank and others},
  journal={Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment},
  volume={15},
  number={12},
  pages={3548--3561},
  year={2022},
  publisher={VLDB Endowment}
}

mcp-server-qdrant: A Qdrant MCP server

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that enables
seamless integration between LLM applications and external data sources and tools. Whether you're building an
AI-powered IDE, enhancing a chat interface, or creating custom AI workflows, MCP provides a standardized way to
connect LLMs with the context they need.

This repository is an example of how to create a MCP server for Qdrant, a vector search engine.

Overview

An official Model Context Protocol server for keeping and retrieving memories in the Qdrant vector search engine.
It acts as a semantic memory layer on top of the Qdrant database.

Components

Tools

1. qdrant-store
   • Store some information in the Qdrant database
   • Input:
     • information (string): Information to store
     • metadata (JSON): Optional metadata to store
     • collection_name (string): Name of the collection to store the information in. This field is required if there are no default collection name.
       If there is a default collection name, this field is not enabled.
   • Returns: Confirmation message
2. qdrant-find
   • Retrieve relevant information from the Qdrant database
   • Input:
     • query (string): Query to use for searching
     • collection_name (string): Name of the collection to store the information in. This field is required if there are no default collection name.
       If there is a default collection name, this field is not enabled.
   • Returns: Information stored in the Qdrant database as separate messages

Environment Variables

Configuration is done via environment variables. The only command-line argument is --transport, used to select the transport protocol.

[!NOTE]
You cannot provide both QDRANT_URL and QDRANT_LOCAL_PATH at the same time.

FastMCP Environment Variables

Since mcp-server-qdrant is based on FastMCP, it also supports all the FastMCP environment variables. The most
important ones are listed below:

[!NOTE]
Before version 0.9.0, these settings used the FASTMCP_SERVER_ prefix, for example FASTMCP_SERVER_HOST.
The old FASTMCP_SERVER_HOST, FASTMCP_SERVER_PORT, and FASTMCP_SERVER_DEBUG names still work but are deprecated
and will be removed in a future release. If both names are set, the new one wins.

Installation

Using uvx

When using uvx no specific installation is needed to directly run mcp-server-qdrant.

QDRANT_URL="http://localhost:6333" \
COLLECTION_NAME="my-collection" \
EMBEDDING_MODEL="sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2" \
uvx mcp-server-qdrant

Transport Protocols

The server supports different transport protocols that can be specified using the --transport flag:

QDRANT_URL="http://localhost:6333" \
COLLECTION_NAME="my-collection" \
uvx mcp-server-qdrant --transport sse

Supported transport protocols:

• stdio (default): Standard input/output transport, might only be used by local MCP clients
• sse: Server-Sent Events transport, perfect for remote clients
• streamable-http: Streamable HTTP transport, perfect for remote clients, more recent than SSE

The default transport is stdio if not specified.

When SSE transport is used, the server will listen on the specified port and wait for incoming connections. The default
port is 8000, however it can be changed using the FASTMCP_PORT environment variable.

QDRANT_URL="http://localhost:6333" \
COLLECTION_NAME="my-collection" \
FASTMCP_PORT=1234 \
uvx mcp-server-qdrant --transport sse

Using Docker

A Dockerfile is available for building and running the MCP server:

## Build the container
docker build -t mcp-server-qdrant .

## Run the container
docker run -p 8000:8000 \
  -e FASTMCP_HOST="0.0.0.0" \
  -e QDRANT_URL="http://your-qdrant-server:6333" \
  -e QDRANT_API_KEY="your-api-key" \
  -e COLLECTION_NAME="your-collection" \
  mcp-server-qdrant

[!TIP]
Please note that we set FASTMCP_HOST="0.0.0.0" to make the server listen on all network interfaces. This is
necessary when running the server in a Docker container.

Installing via Smithery

To install Qdrant MCP Server for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

npx @smithery/cli install mcp-server-qdrant --client claude

Manual configuration of Claude Desktop

To use this server with the Claude Desktop app, add the following configuration to the "mcpServers" section of your
claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "qdrant": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": ["mcp-server-qdrant"],
    "env": {
      "QDRANT_URL": "https://xyz-example.eu-central.aws.cloud.qdrant.io:6333",
      "QDRANT_API_KEY": "your_api_key",
      "COLLECTION_NAME": "your-collection-name",
      "EMBEDDING_MODEL": "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2"
    }
  }
}

For local Qdrant mode:

{
  "qdrant": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": ["mcp-server-qdrant"],
    "env": {
      "QDRANT_LOCAL_PATH": "/path/to/qdrant/database",
      "COLLECTION_NAME": "your-collection-name",
      "EMBEDDING_MODEL": "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2"
    }
  }
}

This MCP server will automatically create a collection with the specified name if it doesn't exist.

By default, the server will use the sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embedding model to encode memories.
For the time being, only FastEmbed models are supported.

Support for other tools

This MCP server can be used with any MCP-compatible client. For example, you can use it with
Cursor and VS Code, which provide built-in support for the Model Context
Protocol.

Using with Cursor/Windsurf

You can configure this MCP server to work as a code search tool for Cursor or Windsurf by customizing the tool
descriptions:

QDRANT_URL="http://localhost:6333" \
COLLECTION_NAME="code-snippets" \
TOOL_STORE_DESCRIPTION="Store reusable code snippets for later retrieval. \
The 'information' parameter should contain a natural language description of what the code does, \
while the actual code should be included in the 'metadata' parameter as a 'code' property. \
The value of 'metadata' is a Python dictionary with strings as keys. \
Use this whenever you generate some code snippet." \
TOOL_FIND_DESCRIPTION="Search for relevant code snippets based on natural language descriptions. \
The 'query' parameter should describe what you're looking for, \
and the tool will return the most relevant code snippets. \
Use this when you need to find existing code snippets for reuse or reference." \
uvx mcp-server-qdrant --transport sse # Enable SSE transport

In Cursor/Windsurf, you can then configure the MCP server in your settings by pointing to this running server using
SSE transport protocol. The description on how to add an MCP server to Cursor can be found in the Cursor
documentation. If you are
running Cursor/Windsurf locally, you can use the following URL:

http://localhost:8000/sse

[!TIP]
We suggest SSE transport as a preferred way to connect Cursor/Windsurf to the MCP server, as it can support remote
connections. That makes it easy to share the server with your team or use it in a cloud environment.

This configuration transforms the Qdrant MCP server into a specialized code search tool that can:

1. Store code snippets, documentation, and implementation details
2. Retrieve relevant code examples based on semantic search
3. Help developers find specific implementations or usage patterns

You can populate the database by storing natural language descriptions of code snippets (in the information parameter)
along with the actual code (in the metadata.code property), and then search for them using natural language queries
that describe what you're looking for.

[!NOTE]
The tool descriptions provided above are examples and may need to be customized for your specific use case. Consider
adjusting the descriptions to better match your team's workflow and the specific types of code snippets you want to
store and retrieve.

If you have successfully installed the mcp-server-qdrant, but still can't get it to work with Cursor, please
consider creating the Cursor rules so the MCP tools are always used when
the agent produces a new code snippet. You can restrict the rules to only work for certain file types, to avoid using
the MCP server for the documentation or other types of content.

Using with Claude Code

You can enhance Claude Code's capabilities by connecting it to this MCP server, enabling semantic search over your
existing codebase.

Setting up mcp-server-qdrant

1. Add the MCP server to Claude Code:

   # Add mcp-server-qdrant configured for code search
   claude mcp add code-search \
   -e QDRANT_URL="http://localhost:6333" \
   -e COLLECTION_NAME="code-repository" \
   -e EMBEDDING_MODEL="sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2" \
   -e TOOL_STORE_DESCRIPTION="Store code snippets with descriptions. The 'information' parameter should contain a natural language description of what the code does, while the actual code should be included in the 'metadata' parameter as a 'code' property." \
   -e TOOL_FIND_DESCRIPTION="Search for relevant code snippets using natural language. The 'query' parameter should describe the functionality you're looking for." \
   -- uvx mcp-server-qdrant
   

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2. Verify the server was added:

   claude mcp list
   

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Using Semantic Code Search in Claude Code

Tool descriptions, specified in TOOL_STORE_DESCRIPTION and TOOL_FIND_DESCRIPTION, guide Claude Code on how to use
the MCP server. The ones provided above are examples and may need to be customized for your specific use case. However,
Claude Code should be already able to:

1. Use the qdrant-store tool to store code snippets with descriptions.
2. Use the qdrant-find tool to search for relevant code snippets using natural language.

Run MCP server in Development Mode

The MCP server can be run in development mode using the mcp dev command. This will start the server and open the MCP
inspector in your browser.

COLLECTION_NAME=mcp-dev fastmcp dev src/mcp_server_qdrant/server.py

Using with VS Code

For one-click installation, click one of the install buttons below:

Manual Installation

Add the following JSON block to your User Settings (JSON) file in VS Code. You can do this by pressing Ctrl + Shift + P and typing Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON).

{
  "mcp": {
    "inputs": [
      {
        "type": "promptString",
        "id": "qdrantUrl",
        "description": "Qdrant URL"
      },
      {
        "type": "promptString",
        "id": "qdrantApiKey",
        "description": "Qdrant API Key",
        "password": true
      },
      {
        "type": "promptString",
        "id": "collectionName",
        "description": "Collection Name"
      }
    ],
    "servers": {
      "qdrant": {
        "command": "uvx",
        "args": ["mcp-server-qdrant"],
        "env": {
          "QDRANT_URL": "${input:qdrantUrl}",
          "QDRANT_API_KEY": "${input:qdrantApiKey}",
          "COLLECTION_NAME": "${input:collectionName}"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Or if you prefer using Docker, add this configuration instead:

{
  "mcp": {
    "inputs": [
      {
        "type": "promptString",
        "id": "qdrantUrl",
        "description": "Qdrant URL"
      },
      {
        "type": "promptString",
        "id": "qdrantApiKey",
        "description": "Qdrant API Key",
        "password": true
      },
      {
        "type": "promptString",
        "id": "collectionName",
        "description": "Collection Name"
      }
    ],
    "servers": {
      "qdrant": {
        "command": "docker",
        "args": [
          "run",
          "-p", "8000:8000",
          "-i",
          "--rm",
          "-e", "QDRANT_URL",
          "-e", "QDRANT_API_KEY",
          "-e", "COLLECTION_NAME",
          "mcp-server-qdrant"
        ],
        "env": {
          "QDRANT_URL": "${input:qdrantUrl}",
          "QDRANT_API_KEY": "${input:qdrantApiKey}",
          "COLLECTION_NAME": "${input:collectionName}"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Alternatively, you can create a .vscode/mcp.json file in your workspace with the following content:

{
  "inputs": [
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "qdrantUrl",
      "description": "Qdrant URL"
    },
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "qdrantApiKey",
      "description": "Qdrant API Key",
      "password": true
    },
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "collectionName",
      "description": "Collection Name"
    }
  ],
  "servers": {
    "qdrant": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-server-qdrant"],
      "env": {
        "QDRANT_URL": "${input:qdrantUrl}",
        "QDRANT_API_KEY": "${input:qdrantApiKey}",
        "COLLECTION_NAME": "${input:collectionName}"
      }
    }
  }
}

For workspace configuration with Docker, use this in .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "inputs": [
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "qdrantUrl",
      "description": "Qdrant URL"
    },
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "qdrantApiKey",
      "description": "Qdrant API Key",
      "password": true
    },
    {
      "type": "promptString",
      "id": "collectionName",
      "description": "Collection Name"
    }
  ],
  "servers": {
    "qdrant": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-p", "8000:8000",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-e", "QDRANT_URL",
        "-e", "QDRANT_API_KEY",
        "-e", "COLLECTION_NAME",
        "mcp-server-qdrant"
      ],
      "env": {
        "QDRANT_URL": "${input:qdrantUrl}",
        "QDRANT_API_KEY": "${input:qdrantApiKey}",
        "COLLECTION_NAME": "${input:collectionName}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Contributing

If you have suggestions for how mcp-server-qdrant could be improved, or want to report a bug, open an issue!
We'd love all and any contributions.

Testing mcp-server-qdrant locally

The MCP inspector is a developer tool for testing and debugging MCP
servers. It runs both a client UI (default port 5173) and an MCP proxy server (default port 3000). Open the client UI in
your browser to use the inspector.

QDRANT_URL=":memory:" COLLECTION_NAME="test" \
fastmcp dev src/mcp_server_qdrant/server.py

Once started, open your browser to http://localhost:5173 to access the inspector interface.

License

This MCP server is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. This means you are free to use, modify, and distribute the
software, subject to the terms and conditions of the Apache License 2.0. For more details, please see the LICENSE file
in the project repository.

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