head to head · open source
Milvus vs graphqlite
Milvus has 46,291 GitHub stars, 4,279 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. graphqlite has 501 stars, 29 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 9,140% (46,291 vs 501 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; graphqlite is written in C under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, graphqlite 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 | graphqlite | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 501 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-30 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 29 |
| 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 graphqlite if
- You want the graphqlite feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and graphqlite 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 graphqlite
GraphQLite is an MIT licensed SQLite extension, written in C, that adds graph database capabilities to SQLite through the Cypher query language and built in graph algorithms, and it is aimed at developers and data teams who want to store and query connected data inside an ordinary SQLite database rather than operating a separate graph server.
read the full graphqlite overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or graphqlite more popular?
Milvus has 46,291 GitHub stars and graphqlite has 501. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and graphqlite free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and graphqlite under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and graphqlite?
Milvus is written in Go and graphqlite 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 graphqlite?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,291 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose graphqlite if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.