head to head · open source
Milvus vs badger
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. badger has 15,762 stars, 1,318 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 193% (46,166 vs 15,762 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; badger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, badger 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 (golang), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | badger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 badger if
- You want the badger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and badger 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 badger
BadgerDB is an embeddable, persistent, fast key value database written in pure Go, aimed at Go developers who need local high performance storage inside their own applications rather than a separate database server.
read the full badger overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or badger more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and badger has 15,762. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and badger free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and badger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and badger?
Milvus is written in Go and badger in Go. 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 badger?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose badger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.