head to head · open source
Milvus vs realm-swift
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. realm-swift has 16,608 stars, 2,241 forks, 499 open issues and last shipped today. Milvus leads on adoption by 178% (46,166 vs 16,608 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Objective-C |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 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
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 realm-swift
Realm Database is a mobile database that runs directly inside phones, tablets, and wearables, and it is for iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS developers who need a replacement for Core Data and SQLite.
read the full realm-swift overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or realm-swift more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and realm-swift has 16,608. 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 (46,166 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.