head to head · open source
Milvus vs age
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. age has 4,828 stars, 525 forks, 249 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 856% (46,166 vs 4,828 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; age is written in C under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, age 11%. 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 | age | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 525 |
| 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 age if
- You want the age 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 age 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 age
Apache AGE is an extension for PostgreSQL that adds a graph database to an existing relational database. AGE stands for A Graph Extension, and the project is inspired by Bitnine's AgensGraph, a multi model database fork of PostgreSQL. It lives in the PostgreSQL ecosystem and is written in C under the Apache 2.0 license. The core principle is a single storage layer that handles both the relational and the graph data model, so users can write standard ANSI SQL alongside openCypher, one of the most widely used graph query languages.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or age more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and age has 4,828. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and age free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and age under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and age?
Milvus is written in Go and age 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 age?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose age if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.