head to head · open source
Milvus vs risingwave
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. risingwave has 9,334 stars, 840 forks, 1,687 open issues and last shipped today. Milvus leads on adoption by 395% (46,166 vs 9,334 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; risingwave is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, risingwave 9%. risingwave 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 | risingwave | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 9.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 840 |
| 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 risingwave if
- You want the risingwave feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and risingwave 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 risingwave
RisingWave is an Apache 2.0, Rust written event streaming platform for agentic AI that continuously ingests data from databases, event streams and webhooks, processes it incrementally, and serves fresh results at low latency, and it is aimed at teams building agents, real time applications and streaming data pipelines that need always current, queryable data.
read the full risingwave overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or risingwave more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and risingwave has 9,334. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and risingwave free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and risingwave under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and risingwave?
Milvus is written in Go and risingwave 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 risingwave?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose risingwave if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.