head to head · open source
Milvus vs faiss
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. faiss has 40,939 stars, 4,527 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 13% (46,166 vs 40,939 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 41K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 4.5K |
| 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 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
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 faiss
Faiss is an MIT licensed C++ library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors, with complete Python and NumPy wrappers, developed primarily at Meta's Fundamental AI Research group, and it is intended for engineers and researchers who need nearest neighbour search over vector sets that range from small collections to sets that possibly do not fit in RAM.
read the full faiss overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or faiss more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and faiss has 40,939. 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 (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose faiss if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.