head to head · open source
Milvus vs Activeloop
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Activeloop has 9,265 stars, 725 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 403% (46,578 vs 9,265 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Activeloop is written in C++ under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Activeloop 8%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (llm), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | Activeloop | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 9.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-05-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 725 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Milvus if
- You weight community size — 47K 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 Activeloop if
- You want the Activeloop feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Activeloop fits your workflow better
About Milvus
What is Milvus? 🐦 Milvus is a high performance vector database built for scale. It powers AI applications by efficiently organizing and searching vast amounts of unstructured data, such as text, images, and multi modal information. 🧑💻 Written in Go and C++, Milvus implements hardware acceleration for CPU/GPU to achieve best in class vector search performance. Thanks to its fully distributed and K8s native architecture, Milvus can scale horizontally, handle tens of thousands of search queries on billions of vectors, and keep data fresh with real time streaming updates. Milvus also supports Standalone mode for…
read the full Milvus overview →
About Activeloop
Deep Lake: Database for AI Docs • Get Started • API Reference • LangChain & VectorDBs Course • Blog • Whitepaper • Slack • Twitter What is Deep Lake? Deep Lake is a Database for AI powered by a storage format optimized for deep learning applications. Deep Lake can be used for: 1. Storing and searching data plus vectors while building LLM applications 2. Managing datasets while training deep learning models Deep Lake simplifies the deployment of enterprise grade LLM based products by offering storage for all data types (embeddings, audio, text, videos, images, dicom, pdfs…
read the full Activeloop overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Activeloop more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and Activeloop has 9,265. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Activeloop free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Activeloop under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and Activeloop?
Milvus is written in Go and Activeloop 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 Activeloop?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Activeloop if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.