head to head · open source
mall vs Milvus
mall has 84,789 GitHub stars, 29,826 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Milvus has 46,145 stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. mall leads on adoption by 84% (84,789 vs 46,145 stars). mall is written in Java under Apache-2.0; Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. mall has attracted 35% as many forks as stars, Milvus 9%. 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
| mall | Milvus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 85K | ★ 46K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-15 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 30K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick mall if
- You weight community size — 85K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 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 mall
mall is a complete e commerce system built on Spring Boot and MyBatis, distributed as a Java project under the Apache 2.0 license. It ships two applications in one repository: a storefront system for shoppers and an administrative back office for operators. The storefront covers the home portal, product recommendation, product search, product display, shopping cart, order flow, member center, customer service, and help center. The back office covers product management, order management, member management, promotion management, operations management, content management, statistics reports, finance management, perm…
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 mall or Milvus more popular?
mall has 84,789 GitHub stars and Milvus has 46,145. mall has the larger community by that measure.
Are mall and Milvus free?
Both are open source. mall is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Milvus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between mall and Milvus?
mall 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, mall or Milvus?
Choose mall if you want the larger community (84,789 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.