head to head · open source
Milvus vs rocksdb
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rocksdb has 32,241 stars, 7,006 forks, 1,645 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 44% (46,563 vs 32,241 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; rocksdb is written in C++ under GPL-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, rocksdb 22%. 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 | rocksdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 7.0K |
| 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 rocksdb if
- You want the rocksdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and rocksdb 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 rocksdb
RocksDB: A Persistent Key Value Store for Flash and RAM Storage RocksDB is developed and maintained by Facebook Database Engineering Team. It is built on earlier work on LevelDB by Sanjay Ghemawat (sanjay@google.com) and Jeff Dean (jeff@google.com) This code is a library that forms the core building block for a fast key value server, especially suited for storing data on flash drives. It has a Log Structured Merge Database (LSM) design with flexible tradeoffs between Write Amplification Factor (WAF), Read Amplification Factor (RAF) and Space Amplification Factor (SAF). It has multi threaded compactions, making…
read the full rocksdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or rocksdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and rocksdb has 32,241. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and rocksdb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rocksdb under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and rocksdb?
Milvus is written in Go and rocksdb in 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 rocksdb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,563 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rocksdb if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.