head to head · open source
Milvus vs realm-swift
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. realm-swift has 16,598 stars, 2,232 forks, 499 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 181% (46,578 vs 16,598 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; realm-swift is written in Objective-C under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, realm-swift 13%. 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 | realm-swift | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Objective-C |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-09-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 realm-swift if
- You want the realm-swift feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Objective-C
- You evaluated both and realm-swift 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 realm-swift
About Realm Database Realm is a mobile database that runs directly inside phones, tablets or wearables. This repository holds the source code for the iOS, macOS, tvOS & watchOS versions of Realm Swift & Realm Objective C. Why Use Realm Intuitive to Developers: Realm’s object oriented data model is simple to learn, doesn’t need an ORM, and lets you write less code. Built for Mobile: Realm is fully featured, lightweight, and efficiently uses memory, disk space, and battery life. Designed for Offline Use: Realm’s local database persists data on disk, so apps work as well offline as they do online. Object Oriented…
read the full realm-swift overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or realm-swift more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and realm-swift has 16,598. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and realm-swift free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and realm-swift under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and realm-swift?
Milvus is written in Go and realm-swift in Objective-C. 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 realm-swift?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose realm-swift if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.