head to head · open source
Milvus vs Raphtory
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Raphtory has 651 stars, 71 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 7,055% (46,578 vs 651 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Raphtory is written in Rust under GPL-3.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Raphtory 11%. 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 | Raphtory | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 651 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 71 |
| 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 Raphtory if
- You want the Raphtory feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Raphtory 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 Raphtory
🌍 Website   📒 Documentation   Pometry   🧙Tutorial   🐛 Report a Bug   Join Slack Raphtory is an in memory vectorised graph database written in Rust with friendly Python APIs on top. It is blazingly fast, scales to hundreds of millions of edges on your laptop, and can be dropped into your existing pipelines with a simple pip install raphtory . It can be ran embedded or as a server instance using GraphQL, supports time traveling, full text search, multilayer modelling, and advanced analytics beyond simple querying like automatic risk detection, dynamic scoring, and temporal motifs. With the…
read the full Raphtory overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Raphtory more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and Raphtory has 651. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Raphtory free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Raphtory under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and Raphtory?
Milvus is written in Go and Raphtory 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 Raphtory?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Raphtory if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.