head to head · open source
Milvus vs lowdb
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. lowdb has 22,580 stars, 962 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 104% (46,166 vs 22,580 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; lowdb is written in JavaScript under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, lowdb 4%. 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 | lowdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 23K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-03-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 962 |
| 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 lowdb if
- You want the lowdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and lowdb 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 lowdb
lowdb is a small, MIT licensed embedded JSON database for JavaScript and TypeScript that persists data to a plain db.json file, aimed at Node.js, Electron, and browser projects that need local storage without running a database server.
read the full lowdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or lowdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and lowdb has 22,580. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and lowdb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and lowdb under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and lowdb?
Milvus is written in Go and lowdb 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 lowdb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose lowdb if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.