head to head · open source
Milvus vs aleph
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. aleph has 2,500 stars, 370 forks, 371 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 1,763% (46,578 vs 2,500 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-02-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 370 |
| 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 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
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 aleph
.. epigraph:: Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too. The Aleph , Jorge Luis Borges :warning: PROJECT STATUS: SUNSETTING :warning: Our involvement with this open source project is being sunsetted. Maintenance of this version will officially end after December 2025. Why? This decision marks a significant strategic shift for us. Over the past year, our team has completely rewritten the Aleph codebase from scratch to launch Aleph Pro. As we transition to this new supported platform, we are focusing our…
read the full aleph overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or aleph more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and aleph has 2,500. 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 (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose aleph if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.