head to head · open source
Milvus vs age
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. age has 4,927 stars, 544 forks, 249 open issues and last shipped 23 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 845% (46,578 vs 4,927 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 544 |
| 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 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
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 age
is a leading multi model graph database Graph Processing & Analytics for Relational Databases What is Apache AGE? Apache AGE is an extension for PostgreSQL that enables users to leverage a graph database on top of the existing relational databases. AGE is an acronym for A Graph Extension and is inspired by Bitnine's AgensGraph, a multi model database fork of PostgreSQL. The basic principle of the project is to create a single storage that handles both the relational and graph data model so that the users can use the standard ANSI SQL along with openCypher, one of the most popular graph query languages today…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or age more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and age has 4,927. 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 (46,578 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.