head to head · open source
etcd vs Milvus
etcd has 52,270 GitHub stars, 10,504 forks, 351 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus has 46,145 stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. etcd leads on adoption by 13% (52,270 vs 46,145 stars). etcd is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. etcd has attracted 20% as many forks as stars, Milvus 9%. etcd 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
| etcd | Milvus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 46K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick etcd if
- You weight community size — 52K 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 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 etcd
etcd is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Go written distributed key value store that holds the most critical data of a distributed system in a Raft replicated log, aimed at the platform and infrastructure engineers who must keep that control plane data consistent and available.
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 etcd or Milvus more popular?
etcd has 52,270 GitHub stars and Milvus has 46,145. etcd has the larger community by that measure.
Are etcd and Milvus free?
Both are open source. etcd is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Milvus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between etcd and Milvus?
etcd is written in Go 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, etcd or Milvus?
Choose etcd if you want the larger community (52,270 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Milvus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.