head to head · open source
Milvus vs cassandra
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cassandra has 10,134 stars, 4,072 forks, 529 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 360% (46,578 vs 10,134 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cassandra is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cassandra 40%. 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 | cassandra | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 10K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 cassandra if
- You want the cassandra feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and cassandra 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 cassandra
image: link= image: Status, link= image: Downloads, link= image: Pulls, link= image: link= image: link= image: link= image: link= Apache Cassandra Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable partitioned row store. Rows are organized into tables with a required primary key. means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. store] means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of…
read the full cassandra overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or cassandra more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and cassandra has 10,134. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and cassandra free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cassandra under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and cassandra?
Milvus is written in Go and cassandra in Java. 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 cassandra?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cassandra if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.