head to head · open source
Milvus vs dbgate
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. dbgate has 7,318 stars, 473 forks, 461 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 531% (46,166 vs 7,318 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; dbgate is written in JavaScript under GPL-3.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, dbgate 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 | dbgate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 7.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 473 |
| 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 dbgate if
- You want the dbgate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and dbgate 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 dbgate
DbGate is a cross platform, GPL 3.0 licensed database manager for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, SQLite and a dozen further engines, built for developers and data engineers who work with several databases at once and want one client on Windows, Linux, macOS or in a browser.
read the full dbgate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or dbgate more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and dbgate has 7,318. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and dbgate free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dbgate under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and dbgate?
Milvus is written in Go and dbgate in JavaScript. 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 dbgate?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dbgate if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.