head to head · open source
Milvus vs badger
Milvus has 46,595 GitHub stars, 4,328 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. badger has 15,799 stars, 1,342 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 16 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 195% (46,595 vs 15,799 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.
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Side by side
| Milvus | badger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 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
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 badger
BadgerDB BadgerDB is an embeddable, persistent and fast key value (KV) database written in pure Go. It is the underlying database for Dgraph, a fast, distributed graph database. It's meant to be a performant alternative to non Go based key value stores like RocksDB. Project Status Badger is stable and is being used to serve data sets worth hundreds of terabytes. Badger supports concurrent ACID transactions with serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) guarantees. A Jepsen style bank test runs nightly for 8h, with race flag and ensures the maintenance of transactional guarantees. Badger has also been tested to work…
read the full badger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or badger more popular?
Milvus has 46,595 GitHub stars and badger has 15,799. 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 (46,595 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.