head to head · open source
Milvus vs cayley
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,067 stars, 1,234 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 209% (46,563 vs 15,067 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 15K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Milvus if
- You weight community size — 47K 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 cayley if
- You want the cayley feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cayley fits your workflow better
About Milvus
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…
read the full Milvus overview →
About cayley
Cayley is an open source database for Linked Data. It is inspired by the graph database behind Google's Knowledge Graph (formerly Freebase)). Documentation Features Built in query editor, visualizer and REPL Multiple query languages: Gizmo: query language inspired by Gremlin GraphQL inspired query language MQL: simplified version for Freebase) fans Modular: easy to connect to your favorite programming languages and back end stores Production ready: well tested and used by various companies for their production workloads Fast: optimized specifically for usage in applications Performance Rough performance testing…
read the full cayley overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or cayley more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,067. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and cayley free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and cayley?
Milvus is written in Go and cayley in Go. 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 cayley?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,563 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.