head to head · open source
Milvus vs aleph
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. aleph has 2,434 stars, 362 forks, 371 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 1,797% (46,166 vs 2,434 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; aleph is written in JavaScript under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, aleph 15%. 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 | aleph | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-02-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 362 |
| 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 aleph if
- You want the aleph feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and aleph 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 aleph
Aleph is an MIT licensed open source search and browsing tool for large collections of documents and structured data. It indexes PDF, Word, HTML, CSV, XLS, and SQL inputs so users can search mixed evidence sources in one tool. The project lives in the open source data search, graph database, investigative journalism, and OSINT ecosystem, and it is built with investigative reporting as a primary use case.
read the full aleph overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or aleph more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and aleph has 2,434. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and aleph free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and aleph under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and aleph?
Milvus is written in Go and aleph in JavaScript. 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 aleph?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose aleph if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.