head to head · open source
Milvus vs orientdb
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. orientdb has 4,997 stars, 870 forks, 360 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 832% (46,578 vs 4,997 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; orientdb is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, orientdb 17%. 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 | orientdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 870 |
| 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 orientdb if
- You want the orientdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and orientdb 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 orientdb
OrientDB What is OrientDB? OrientDB is an Open Source Multi Model NoSQL DBMS with the support of Native Graphs, Documents, Full Text search, Reactivity, Geo Spatial and Object Oriented concepts. It's written in Java and it's amazingly fast. No expensive run time JOINs, connections are managed as persistent pointers between records. You can traverse thousands of records in no time. Supports schema less, schema full and schema mixed modes. Has a strong security profiling system based on user, roles and predicate security and supports SQL amongst the query languages. Thanks to the SQL layer it's straightforward to…
read the full orientdb 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 orientdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and orientdb has 4,997. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and orientdb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and orientdb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and orientdb?
Milvus is written in Go and orientdb 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 orientdb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose orientdb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.