head to head · open source
Milvus vs Chroma
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Chroma has 29,627 stars, 2,604 forks, 843 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 57% (46,578 vs 29,627 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Chroma is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Chroma 9%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | Chroma | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 30K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 Chroma if
- You want the Chroma feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Chroma 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 Chroma
Chroma the open source data infrastructure for AI . Docs Homepage Chroma Cloud Our hosted service, Chroma Cloud, powers serverless vector, hybrid, and full text search. It's extremely fast, cost effective, scalable and painless. Create a DB and try it out in under 30 seconds with $5 of free credits. Get started with Chroma Cloud API The core API is only 4 functions (run our 💡 Google Colab): Learn about all features on our Docs Get involved Chroma is a rapidly developing project. We welcome PR contributors and ideas for how to improve the project. Join the conversation on Discord contributing channel Review the…
read the full Chroma overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Chroma more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and Chroma has 29,627. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Chroma free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Chroma under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and Chroma?
Milvus is written in Go and Chroma in Rust. 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 Chroma?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Chroma if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.