head to head · open source
Milvus vs gel
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gel has 14,180 stars, 454 forks, 948 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 228% (46,578 vs 14,180 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | gel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 14K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2025-12-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 454 |
| 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 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
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 gel
Gel Learn: build an app with Gel • Website • Docs • Blog • Discord • Twitter What is Gel? Gel is a new kind of database that takes the best parts of relational databases, graph databases, and ORMs. We call it a graph relational database . 🧩 Types, not tables 🧩 Schema is the foundation of your application. It should be something you can read, write, and understand. Forget foreign keys; tabular data modeling is a relic of an older age, and it isn't compatible with modern languages. Instead, Gel thinks about schema the same way you do: as object types containing properties connected by links . This example is…
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or gel more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and gel has 14,180. 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 (46,578 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.