head to head · open source
Milvus vs Orama
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Orama has 10,557 stars, 402 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 337% (46,166 vs 10,557 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Orama is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Orama 4%. 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 | Orama | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 402 |
| 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 Orama if
- You want the Orama feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Orama 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 Orama
Orama is a search engine and RAG pipeline written in TypeScript and distributed as an npm package. It can run in a browser, on a server, or on an edge network, and it provides full text, vector, and hybrid search in a package described as less than 2kb. The project lives in the JavaScript and Node ecosystem, and it is categorized as infrastructure and operations database software.
read the full Orama overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Orama more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and Orama has 10,557. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Orama free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Orama has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Milvus and Orama?
Milvus is written in Go and Orama in TypeScript. 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 Orama?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Orama if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.