head to head · open source
Milvus vs drawDB
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. drawDB has 40,223 stars, 3,350 forks, 241 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 16% (46,563 vs 40,223 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; drawDB is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, drawDB 8%. 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 | drawDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 40K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 3.4K |
| 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 drawDB if
- You want the drawDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and drawDB 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 drawDB
drawDB Free, simple, and intuitive database schema editor and SQL generator. DrawDB is a robust and user friendly database entity relationship diagram (ERD) editor right in your browser. Build diagrams with a few clicks, export and import SQL scripts, generate migrations, customize your editor, and more without creating an account. See the full set of features on here. Getting Started Local Development Build Docker Build If you want to enable sharing, set up the server and environment variables according to .env.sample . This is optional unless you need to share files. Contributing Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for…
read the full drawDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or drawDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and drawDB has 40,223. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and drawDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and drawDB under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and drawDB?
Milvus is written in Go and drawDB 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 drawDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,563 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose drawDB if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.