head to head · open source
Milvus vs Databend
Milvus has 46,598 GitHub stars, 4,328 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Databend has 9,490 stars, 901 forks, 565 open issues and last shipped today. Milvus leads on adoption by 391% (46,598 vs 9,490 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Databend is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. 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.
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Side by side
| Milvus | Databend | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 9.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 901 |
| 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 Databend if
- You want the Databend feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Databend 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 Databend
Databend Enterprise Data Warehouse for AI Agents Large scale analytics, vector search, full text search — with flexible agent orchestration and secure Python UDF sandboxes. Built for enterprise AI workloads. ☁️ Try Cloud • 🚀 Quick Start • 📖 Documentation • 💬 Slack 💡 Why Databend? Databend is an open source enterprise data warehouse built in Rust. Core capabilities : Analytics, vector search, full text search, auto schema evolution — unified in one engine. Agent ready : Sandbox UDFs for agent logic, SQL for orchestration, transactions for reliability, branching for safe experimentation on production data. ⚡…
read the full Databend overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Databend more popular?
Milvus has 46,598 GitHub stars and Databend has 9,490. 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 under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
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 (46,598 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Databend if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.