head to head · open source
Milvus vs hugegraph
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. hugegraph has 3,183 stars, 637 forks, 373 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 1,350% (46,166 vs 3,183 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; hugegraph is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, hugegraph 20%. 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 | hugegraph | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 637 |
| 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 hugegraph if
- You want the hugegraph feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and hugegraph 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 hugegraph
Apache HugeGraph is a graph database written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Apache ecosystem and stores vertices and edges for graph traversal workloads. The project includes an OLTP engine, a REST API, and pluggable backend stores. The repository tagline states support for more than 100+ billion data, while the README excerpt states support for more than 10 billion vertices and edges.
read the full hugegraph overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or hugegraph more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and hugegraph has 3,183. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and hugegraph free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and hugegraph under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and hugegraph?
Milvus is written in Go and hugegraph in Java. 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 hugegraph?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose hugegraph if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.