head to head · open source
Milvus vs citus
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. citus has 12,779 stars, 793 forks, 1,075 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 261% (46,166 vs 12,779 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; citus is written in C under AGPL-3.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, citus 6%. 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 | citus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 793 |
| 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 citus if
- You want the citus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and citus 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 citus
Citus is an AGPL 3.0 licensed PostgreSQL extension, written in C, that turns an ordinary Postgres server into a distributed database for teams whose applications have outgrown a single PostgreSQL node.
read the full citus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or citus more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and citus has 12,779. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and citus free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and citus under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and citus?
Milvus is written in Go and citus in C. 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 citus?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose citus if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.