head to head · open source
Milvus vs activegraph
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. activegraph has 1,405 stars, 273 forks, 242 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 3,186% (46,166 vs 1,405 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; activegraph is written in Ruby under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, activegraph 19%. 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 | activegraph | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-08-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 273 |
| 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 activegraph if
- You want the activegraph feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and activegraph 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 activegraph
activegraph is a Ruby and JRuby wrapper for the Neo4j graph database, formerly called Neo4j.rb. It provides an Active Model compliant wrapper over Neo4j, so Ruby applications can work with graph data through model code and associations instead of writing low level database calls. The project lives in the Ruby ecosystem and sits in the database and infrastructure category, with topics that include graph database, neo4j, orm, railtie, and ruby.
read the full activegraph overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or activegraph more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and activegraph has 1,405. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and activegraph free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and activegraph under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and activegraph?
Milvus is written in Go and activegraph in Ruby. 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 activegraph?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose activegraph if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.