head to head · open source
Milvus vs neo4j
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. neo4j has 17,241 stars, 2,703 forks, 252 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 168% (46,145 vs 17,241 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; neo4j is written in Java under GPL-3.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, neo4j 16%. 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 | neo4j | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.7K |
| 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 neo4j if
- You want the neo4j feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and neo4j 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 neo4j
Neo4j is a Java graph database released under GPL 3.0 that stores data as nodes and relationships and queries it with Cypher, aimed at developers, data engineers, and platform teams building connected data applications who would otherwise model those relationships as tables and joins.
read the full neo4j overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or neo4j more popular?
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars and neo4j has 17,241. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and neo4j free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and neo4j under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and neo4j?
Milvus is written in Go and neo4j 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 neo4j?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,145 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose neo4j if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.