head to head · open source
Milvus vs orbitdb
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. orbitdb has 8,809 stars, 595 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 424% (46,166 vs 8,809 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; orbitdb is written in JavaScript under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, orbitdb 7%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (distributed), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | orbitdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 8.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-05-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 595 |
| 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 orbitdb if
- You want the orbitdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and orbitdb 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 orbitdb
OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer to peer database for the decentralized web that stores its data in IPFS and syncs it with peers over Libp2p Pubsub, and it is aimed at developers building decentralized, blockchain, and local first applications in JavaScript.
read the full orbitdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or orbitdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and orbitdb has 8,809. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and orbitdb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and orbitdb under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and orbitdb?
Milvus is written in Go and orbitdb in JavaScript. 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 orbitdb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose orbitdb if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.