head to head · open source
Milvus vs citus
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. citus has 12,840 stars, 805 forks, 1,075 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 263% (46,578 vs 12,840 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 805 |
| 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 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
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 citus
What is Citus? Citus is a PostgreSQL extension that transforms Postgres into a distributed database—so you can achieve high performance at any scale. With Citus, you extend your PostgreSQL database with new superpowers: Distributed tables are sharded across a cluster of PostgreSQL nodes to combine their CPU, memory, storage and I/O capacity. Reference tables are replicated to all nodes for joins and foreign keys from distributed tables and to maximize read performance. Distributed query engine routes and parallelizes SELECT, DML, and other operations on distributed tables across the cluster. Columnar storage…
read the full citus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or citus more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and citus has 12,840. 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 (46,578 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.