head to head · open source
Milvus vs QuestDB
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. QuestDB has 17,496 stars, 1,685 forks, 952 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 166% (46,563 vs 17,496 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; QuestDB is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, QuestDB 10%. QuestDB 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 | QuestDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 QuestDB if
- You want the QuestDB 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 QuestDB 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 QuestDB
English 简体中文 QuestDB is the open source, low latency time series database on open formats. It ingests millions of events per second, computes on live data in milliseconds, and keeps years of history queryable. One SQL engine spans ingestion, stream processing, and tiered storage. The engine is zero GC Java with C++ and Rust on the hot paths. Data lives in memory mapped, time partitioned columns. Queries run across all cores with SIMD and JIT compiled filters. There are no third party dependencies on the data path. Storage is tiered: a parallel write ahead log, native columnar partitions, and Apache Parquet. In…
read the full QuestDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or QuestDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and QuestDB has 17,496. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and QuestDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and QuestDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and QuestDB?
Milvus is written in Go and QuestDB 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 QuestDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,563 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose QuestDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.