head to head · open source
Milvus vs Dragonfly
Milvus has 46,153 GitHub stars, 4,256 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Dragonfly has 31,579 stars, 1,264 forks, 308 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 46% (46,153 vs 31,579 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Dragonfly is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Dragonfly 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 | Dragonfly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 Dragonfly if
- You want the Dragonfly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Dragonfly 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 Dragonfly
Dragonfly is a C++ in memory data store that speaks the Redis and Memcached APIs, built for teams that want more throughput and lower resource use from an existing cache or key value workload without changing application code.
read the full Dragonfly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Dragonfly more popular?
Milvus has 46,153 GitHub stars and Dragonfly has 31,579. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Dragonfly free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Dragonfly has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Milvus and Dragonfly?
Milvus is written in Go and Dragonfly in C++. 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 Dragonfly?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,153 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Dragonfly if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.