head to head · open source
Milvus vs Memgraph
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Memgraph has 4,573 stars, 283 forks, 813 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 910% (46,166 vs 4,573 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Memgraph is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Memgraph 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | Memgraph | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 4.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 283 |
| 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 Memgraph if
- You want the Memgraph feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Memgraph 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 Memgraph
Memgraph is an open source, in memory graph database written in C and C++ for real time graph analytics, GraphRAG, AI memory, and agentic workflows. It is ACID compliant and highly available. It lives in the graph database and AI infrastructure ecosystem and uses a Cypher compatible query layer familiar from Neo4j environments.
read the full Memgraph overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Memgraph more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and Memgraph has 4,573. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Memgraph free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Memgraph has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Milvus and Memgraph?
Milvus is written in Go and Memgraph 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 Memgraph?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Memgraph if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.