head to head · open source
Elasticsearch vs Milvus
Elasticsearch has 77,926 GitHub stars, 26,071 forks, 6,059 open issues and last shipped today. Milvus has 46,153 stars, 4,256 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Elasticsearch leads on adoption by 69% (77,926 vs 46,153 stars). Elasticsearch is written in Java under a custom or non-standard licence; Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Elasticsearch has attracted 33% as many forks as stars, Milvus 9%. Elasticsearch 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
| Elasticsearch | Milvus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 78K | ★ 46K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 26K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Elasticsearch if
- You weight community size — 78K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Milvus if
- You want the Milvus 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 Milvus fits your workflow better
About Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built in Java, designed for near real time search, scalability, and high performance data querying on production workloads. It serves as the core storage and indexing layer of Elastic’s open stack and supports full text, structured, and vector based search.
read the full Elasticsearch overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Elasticsearch or Milvus more popular?
Elasticsearch has 77,926 GitHub stars and Milvus has 46,153. Elasticsearch has the larger community by that measure.
Are Elasticsearch and Milvus free?
Both are open source. Elasticsearch has no licence declared in this registry, and Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Elasticsearch and Milvus?
Elasticsearch is written in Java and Milvus 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, Elasticsearch or Milvus?
Choose Elasticsearch if you want the larger community (77,926 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Milvus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.