head to head · open source
Milvus vs Dragonfly
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Dragonfly has 31,844 stars, 1,295 forks, 308 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 46% (46,563 vs 31,844 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%. Dragonfly 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 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
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 Dragonfly
Before moving on, please consider giving us a GitHub star ⭐️. Thank you! Other languages: 简体中文 日本語 한국어 Português ภาษาไทย Website • Docs • Quick Start • Community Discord • Dragonfly User Conference • Join the Dragonfly Community GitHub Discussions • GitHub Issues • Contributing • AI Agents Guide • Dragonfly Cloud The world's most efficient in memory data store Dragonfly is an in memory data store built for modern application workloads. Fully compatible with Redis and Memcached APIs, Dragonfly requires no code changes to adopt. Compared to legacy in memory datastores, Dragonfly delivers 25X more throughput…
read the full Dragonfly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Dragonfly more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and Dragonfly has 31,844. 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 (46,563 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.