head to head · open source
Milvus vs acl
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. acl has 3,104 stars, 951 forks, 40 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 1,387% (46,166 vs 3,104 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; acl is written in C under LGPL-2.1. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, acl 31%. 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 | acl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | LGPL-2.1 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 951 |
| 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 acl if
- You want the acl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-2.1 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and acl 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 acl
Acl (Advanced C/C++ Library, "Advanced Cross Platform C/C++ Network Communication Library and Server Framework") is a cross platform C network communication library and server framework, with coroutine, HTTP/HTTPS/WebSocket, MQTT, SMTP, Redis, Memcached and MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite support, built for developers writing network servers and clients on Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, macOS, Android, iOS and HarmonyOS.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or acl more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and acl has 3,104. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and acl free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and acl under LGPL-2.1. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and acl?
Milvus is written in Go and acl in C. 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 acl?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose acl if its feature set, stack or LGPL-2.1 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.