What is the difference between Milvus and Qdrant?

Milvus is a distributed open-source vector database written in Go and C++, designed for horizontal scaling across many nodes with separate compute and storage tiers, often billion-vector deployments. Qdrant is written in Rust, prioritizes single-node efficiency with rich filtering and payload features, and scales horizontally more recently. Milvus wins on proven scale and cloud-native architecture with components like etcd and object storage, while Qdrant wins on single-node performance, memory efficiency, and simpler operations for small-to-medium deployments.