head to head · open source
Milvus vs HelixDB
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. HelixDB has 6,265 stars, 393 forks, 26 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 643% (46,578 vs 6,265 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; HelixDB is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, HelixDB 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 | HelixDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 393 |
| 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 HelixDB if
- You want the HelixDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and HelixDB 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 HelixDB
HelixDB : a graph vector database for knowledge graphs and AI memory. Built from scratch in Rust. website docs discord X/twitter HelixDB is a database that makes it easy to build all the components needed for AI applications in a single platform. You don't need a separate application DB, relational DB, vector DB, graph DB, or application layers to manage the multiple storage locations. HelixDB gives your agents federated access to company data, for memory, company brains, and applications. Helix primarily operates with a graph + vector data model, but it also supports KV, documents, and relational data. Getting…
read the full HelixDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or HelixDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and HelixDB has 6,265. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and HelixDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and HelixDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and HelixDB?
Milvus is written in Go and HelixDB 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 HelixDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose HelixDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.