head to head · open source
Milvus vs FalkorDB
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. FalkorDB has 6,190 stars, 466 forks, 724 open issues and last shipped today. Milvus leads on adoption by 646% (46,166 vs 6,190 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 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 | FalkorDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 466 |
| 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 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
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 FalkorDB
FalkorDB is a Rust based, Redis compatible graph database that stores graphs as sparse adjacency matrices and queries them with linear algebra, built for GraphRAG pipelines, agent memory, cloud security and fraud detection workloads.
read the full FalkorDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or FalkorDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and FalkorDB has 6,190. 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 (46,166 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.