head to head · open source
Milvus vs orioledb
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. orioledb has 4,205 stars, 188 forks, 131 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 998% (46,166 vs 4,205 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; orioledb is written in C under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, orioledb 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | orioledb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 4.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 188 |
| 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 orioledb if
- You want the orioledb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and orioledb 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 orioledb
OrioleDB is an open source storage engine for PostgreSQL, delivered as an extension built on the table access method framework and standard Postgres extension interfaces, intended for database operators, platform engineers, and PostgreSQL contributors who need better vertical scalability and lower maintenance burden than the default heap engine offers.
read the full orioledb 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 orioledb more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and orioledb has 4,205. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and orioledb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and orioledb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and orioledb?
Milvus is written in Go and orioledb in C. 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 orioledb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose orioledb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.