head to head · open source

Milvus vs hugegraph

Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. hugegraph has 3,198 stars, 647 forks, 373 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 1,356% (46,578 vs 3,198 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.

Milvus ★ 47K hugegraph ★ 3.2K category Infrastructure & Operations

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Side by side

Milvus hugegraph
GitHub stars ★ 47K ★ 3.2K
License Apache-2.0 Apache-2.0
Written in Go Java
Last push 2026-11-04 2026-11-03
Forks ⑂ 4.3K ⑂ 647
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

full Milvus profile →

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

full hugegraph profile →

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 hugegraph

A graph database that supports more than 10 billion vertices & edges, high performance and scalability Quick Navigation: Architecture • Quick Start • Module Map • Ecosystem • For Contributors • Community What is Apache HugeGraph? HugeGraph is a fast and highly scalable graph database. Billions of vertices and edges can be easily stored into and queried from HugeGraph due to its excellent OLTP capabilities. HugeGraph is compliant with the Apache TinkerPop 3 framework allowing complicated graph queries to be achieved through the powerful Gremlin graph traversal language. Features Schema Metadata Management…

read the full hugegraph overview →

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Frequently asked questions

Is Milvus or hugegraph more popular?

Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and hugegraph has 3,198. 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 (46,578 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.