head to head · open source
Milvus vs FalkorDB
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. FalkorDB has 10,501 stars, 603 forks, 724 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 344% (46,578 vs 10,501 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; FalkorDB is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, FalkorDB 6%. 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 | FalkorDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 603 |
| 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 FalkorDB if
- You want the FalkorDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and FalkorDB 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 FalkorDB
FalkorDB Ultra fast, Multi tenant Graph Database Powering Generative AI, Agent Memory, Cloud Security, and Fraud Detection UNIQUE FEATURES Our goal is to build a high performance Knowledge Graph tailored for Large Language Models (LLMs), prioritizing exceptionally low latency to ensure fast and efficient information delivery through our Graph Database. 🆕 FalkorDB is the first queryable Property Graph database to leverage sparse matrices for representing the adjacency matrix in graphs and linear algebra for querying. Key Features Sparse Matrix Representation : Utilizes sparse matrices to represent adjacency…
read the full FalkorDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or FalkorDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and FalkorDB has 10,501. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and FalkorDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and FalkorDB has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Milvus and FalkorDB?
Milvus is written in Go and FalkorDB in Rust. 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 FalkorDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose FalkorDB if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.