head to head · open source
Milvus vs cassandra
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. cassandra has 10,100 stars, 4,118 forks, 529 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 357% (46,166 vs 10,100 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 41%. 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 10K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 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
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 cassandra
Apache Cassandra is an open source transactional distributed database written in Java and licensed under Apache 2.0, for users who need linear scalability and proven fault tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure without compromising performance.
read the full cassandra overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or cassandra more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and cassandra has 10,100. 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 (46,166 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.