head to head · open source
Milvus vs couchdb
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. couchdb has 6,953 stars, 1,079 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 564% (46,166 vs 6,953 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; couchdb is written in Erlang under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, couchdb 16%. 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 | couchdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 7.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Erlang |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 couchdb if
- You want the couchdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Erlang
- You evaluated both and couchdb 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 couchdb
Apache CouchDB is an Apache licensed, Erlang built document database with an HTTP/JSON API and multi primary syncing replication, aimed at developers and operators who need data to stay consistent across several nodes, devices, or sites rather than behind one primary server.
read the full couchdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or couchdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and couchdb has 6,953. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and couchdb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and couchdb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and couchdb?
Milvus is written in Go and couchdb in Erlang. 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 couchdb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose couchdb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.