head to head · open source
Milvus vs q
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. q has 10,362 stars, 425 forks, 132 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 346% (46,166 vs 10,362 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 10K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-02-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 425 |
| 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 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
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 q
q is a Python command line tool, licensed under GPL 3.0, that runs SQL statements directly against delimited text files and multi file SQLite databases without importing the data into a database server first.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or q more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and q has 10,362. 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 (46,166 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.