head to head · open source
Milvus vs risingwave
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. risingwave has 9,398 stars, 863 forks, 1,687 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 396% (46,578 vs 9,398 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | risingwave | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 863 |
| 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 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
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 risingwave
🌊 Event Streaming for Agentic AI Docs Benchmarks Demos Case Studies RisingWave is an event streaming platform for agentic AI. It continuously ingests data from databases, event streams, and webhooks, processes it incrementally, and serves fresh results at low latency, replacing the traditional event streaming stack (e.g., Debezium + Kafka + Flink + serving DB) with a single system. Try it out in 60 seconds For Docker, Kubernetes, and other options, see the quick start guide. The problem Agents and real time applications need data that is always fresh and queryable at low latency. The standard approach chains…
read the full risingwave overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or risingwave more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and risingwave has 9,398. 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 (46,578 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.