head to head · open source
Elasticsearch vs Milvus
Elasticsearch has 78,462 GitHub stars, 26,239 forks, 6,059 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus has 46,563 stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Elasticsearch leads on adoption by 69% (78,462 vs 46,563 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 | ★ 47K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| 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 Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine, scalable data store and vector database optimized for speed and relevance on production scale workloads. Elasticsearch is the foundation of Elastic's open Stack platform. Search in near real time over massive datasets, perform vector searches, integrate with generative AI applications, and much more. Use cases enabled by Elasticsearch include: Augmented Generation (RAG)] search] Full text search Logs Metrics Application performance monitoring (APM) Security logs \... and more! To learn more about Elasticsearch's features and…
read the full Elasticsearch overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Elasticsearch or Milvus more popular?
Elasticsearch has 78,462 GitHub stars and Milvus has 46,563. 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 (78,462 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.