head to head · open source
Milvus vs couchdb
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. couchdb has 7,000 stars, 1,088 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 565% (46,578 vs 7,000 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 7.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Erlang |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 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
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 couchdb
Apache CouchDB README ===================== + + + + .. 1 image:: :target: .. 2 image:: :target: Installation For a high level guide to Unix like systems, inc. Mac OS X and Ubuntu, see: INSTALL.Unix For a high level guide to Microsoft Windows, see: INSTALL.Windows Follow the proper instructions to get CouchDB installed on your system. If you're having problems, skip to the next section. Documentation We have documentation: It includes a changelog: For troubleshooting or cryptic error messages, see: For general help, see: We also have an IRC channel: The mailing lists provide a wealth of support and knowledge for…
read the full couchdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or couchdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and couchdb has 7,000. 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 (46,578 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.