head to head · open source
Milvus vs faiss
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. faiss has 41,256 stars, 4,586 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 13% (46,578 vs 41,256 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; faiss is written in C++ under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, faiss 11%. 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 | faiss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 41K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 4.6K |
| 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 faiss if
- You want the faiss feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and faiss 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 faiss
Faiss Faiss is a library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors. It contains algorithms that search in sets of vectors of any size, up to ones that possibly do not fit in RAM. It also contains supporting code for evaluation and parameter tuning. Faiss is written in C++ with complete wrappers for Python/numpy. Some of the most useful algorithms are implemented on the GPU. It is developed primarily at Meta's Fundamental AI Research group. News See CHANGELOG.md for detailed information about latest features. Introduction Faiss contains several methods for similarity search. It assumes that…
read the full faiss overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or faiss more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and faiss has 41,256. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and faiss free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and faiss under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and faiss?
Milvus is written in Go and faiss 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 faiss?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose faiss if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.