head to head · open source
Milvus vs q
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. q has 10,361 stars, 425 forks, 132 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 350% (46,578 vs 10,361 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; q is written in Python under GPL-3.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, q 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 | q | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 10K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-02-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 425 |
| 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 q if
- You want the q feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and q 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 q
q Text as Data q's purpose is to bring SQL expressive power to the Linux command line and to provide easy access to text as actual data. q allows the following: Performing SQL like statements directly on tabular text data, auto caching the data in order to accelerate additional querying on the same file. Performing SQL statements directly on multi file sqlite3 databases, without having to merge them or load them into memory The following table shows the impact of using caching: Notice that for the current version, caching is not enabled by default, since the caches take disk space. Use C readwrite or C read to…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or q more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and q has 10,361. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and q free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and q under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and q?
Milvus is written in Go and q in Python. 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 q?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose q if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.