head to head · open source
Milvus vs Activeloop
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Activeloop has 9,241 stars, 722 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 400% (46,166 vs 9,241 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Activeloop is written in C++ under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Activeloop 8%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (llm), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Milvus | Activeloop | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 9.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-05-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 722 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Milvus if
- You weight community size — 46K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Activeloop if
- You want the Activeloop feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Activeloop fits your workflow better
About Milvus
Milvus is a high performance, cloud native vector database written in Go and C++, designed to power AI applications by efficiently storing, indexing, and searching large scale unstructured data such as text, images, and multi modal embeddings. It implements hardware accelerated approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search using algorithms like HNSW, FAISS, and DiskANN, and supports both real time streaming updates and batch ingestion. Milvus lives in the GenAI infrastructure ecosystem, serving as the persistent storage and retrieval layer for embedding based workloads including RAG, recommendation, and image search.…
read the full Milvus overview →
About Activeloop
Activeloop Deep Lake is an open source database for AI data, written in C++ under Apache 2.0. It presents itself as a tensor database and AI data runtime for agents, combining serverless Postgres with a multimodal datalake for scalable retrieval and training. The project lives in the machine learning infrastructure ecosystem.
read the full Activeloop overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Activeloop more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and Activeloop has 9,241. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Activeloop free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Activeloop under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and Activeloop?
Milvus is written in Go and Activeloop in C++. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Milvus or Activeloop?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Activeloop if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.