head to head · open source
Milvus vs Raphtory
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Raphtory has 642 stars, 70 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 7,091% (46,166 vs 642 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 642 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 70 |
| 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 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
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 Raphtory
Raphtory is a scalable graph analytics database powered by a multithreaded, vectorised temporal engine written in Rust, intended for developers and data teams who need to analyse how relationships change over time rather than only how they stand at the present moment.
read the full Raphtory overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Raphtory more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and Raphtory has 642. 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 (46,166 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.