head to head · open source
Milvus vs Grist
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Grist has 11,831 stars, 644 forks, 727 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 290% (46,166 vs 11,831 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Grist is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Grist 5%. 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 | Grist | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 644 |
| 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 Grist if
- You want the Grist feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Grist 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 Grist
Grist is a modern relational spreadsheet that combines spreadsheet flexibility with database robustness. It lives in the open source database and spreadsheet ecosystem, and the grist core repository provides the server needed to host spreadsheets. The project is positioned as an open alternative to Airtable and Microsoft Excel. Grist Community edition is also known as grist core.
read the full Grist overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Grist more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and Grist has 11,831. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Grist free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Grist under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and Grist?
Milvus is written in Go and Grist in TypeScript. 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 Grist?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Grist if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.