head to head · open source
Milvus vs orbitdb
Milvus has 46,598 GitHub stars, 4,328 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. orbitdb has 8,823 stars, 594 forks, 25 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 428% (46,598 vs 8,823 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 8.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-05-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 594 |
| 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
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
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 orbitdb
OrbitDB OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer to peer database . OrbitDB uses IPFS as its data storage and Libp2p Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It's an eventually consistent database that uses Merkle CRDTs for conflict free database writes and merges making OrbitDB an excellent choice for p2p and decentralized apps, blockchain applications and local first web applications. OrbitDB provides various types of databases for different data models and use cases: events : an immutable (append only) log with traversable history. Useful for "latest N" use cases or as a message queue. documents…
read the full orbitdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or orbitdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,598 GitHub stars and orbitdb has 8,823. 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 (46,598 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose orbitdb if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.