head to head · open source
Milvus vs gel
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. gel has 14,168 stars, 450 forks, 948 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 226% (46,166 vs 14,168 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; gel is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, gel 3%. 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 | gel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 14K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2025-12-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 450 |
| 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 gel if
- You want the gel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gel 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 gel
Gel is an open source graph relational database, written in Python and released under Apache 2.0, that gives application developers a declarative object type schema, the EdgeQL query language, a migrations system, client libraries and a command line tool in place of hand written SQL and a separate ORM layer.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or gel more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and gel has 14,168. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and gel free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and gel under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and gel?
Milvus is written in Go and gel in Python. 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 gel?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gel if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.