head to head · open source
Milvus vs dolt
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dolt has 24,809 stars, 912 forks, 583 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 88% (46,578 vs 24,809 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; dolt is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, dolt 4%. 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 | dolt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 25K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 912 |
| 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 dolt if
- You want the dolt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and dolt 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 dolt
Dolt is Git for Data! Dolt is a SQL database that you can fork, clone, branch, merge, push and pull just like a Git repository. Connect to Dolt just like any MySQL database to read or modify schema and data. Version control functionality is exposed in SQL via system tables, functions, and procedures. Or, use the Git like command line interface to import CSV files, commit your changes, push them to a remote, or merge your teammate's changes. All the commands you know for Git work exactly the same for Dolt. Git versions files. Dolt versions tables. It's like Git and MySQL had a baby. We also built DoltHub, a place…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or dolt more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and dolt has 24,809. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and dolt free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dolt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and dolt?
Milvus is written in Go and dolt in Go. 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 dolt?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dolt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.