head to head · open source
Milvus vs Qdrant
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Qdrant has 35,390 stars, 2,793 forks, 704 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 32% (46,563 vs 35,390 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Qdrant is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Qdrant 8%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (hnsw, image-search), 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 | Qdrant | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 35K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.8K |
| 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 Qdrant if
- You want the Qdrant feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Qdrant 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 Qdrant
Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI applications Qdrant (read: quadrant ) is a vector similarity search engine and vector database. It provides a production ready service with a convenient API to store, search, and manage points—vectors with an additional payload. Qdrant is tailored for extended filtering support, making it useful for all sorts of neural network or semantic based matching, faceted search, and other applications. Qdrant is written in Rust 🦀, which makes it fast and reliable even under high load. See benchmarks. With Qdrant, embeddings or neural network encoders can be turned into…
read the full Qdrant overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Qdrant more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and Qdrant has 35,390. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Qdrant free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Qdrant under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and Qdrant?
Milvus is written in Go and Qdrant in Rust. 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 Qdrant?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,563 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Qdrant if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.