head to head · open source
Milvus vs drawDB
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. drawDB has 39,572 stars, 3,248 forks, 241 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 17% (46,145 vs 39,572 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; drawDB is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, drawDB 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 | drawDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 40K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 3.2K |
| 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 drawDB if
- You want the drawDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and drawDB 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 drawDB
drawDB is a free, open source, browser based database entity relationship diagram (ERD) editor and SQL generator for developers, data modellers, and teams who need to design database schemas and turn them into SQL scripts without creating an account.
read the full drawDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or drawDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars and drawDB has 39,572. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and drawDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and drawDB under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and drawDB?
Milvus is written in Go and drawDB in JavaScript. 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 drawDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,145 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose drawDB if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.