head to head · open source
Milvus vs Databend
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Databend has 9,444 stars, 897 forks, 565 open issues and last shipped today. Milvus leads on adoption by 389% (46,166 vs 9,444 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Databend is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Databend 9%. Databend was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cloud-native), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | Databend | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 897 |
| 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 Databend if
- You want the Databend feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Databend 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 Databend
Databend open source cloud native data warehouse built in Rust. It targets enterprise AI workloads, SQL analytics, vector search, full text search, Python UDF sandbox, lakehouse workloads on S3, Azure, GCS. Project lives in database and infrastructure ecosystem, with topics covering OLAP, bigdata, serverless, geospatial, Elasticsearch, Snowflake.
read the full Databend overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Databend more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and Databend has 9,444. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Databend free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Databend has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Milvus and Databend?
Milvus is written in Go and Databend in Rust. 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 Databend?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Databend if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.