head to head · open source
Milvus vs SlateDB
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SlateDB has 3,610 stars, 332 forks, 184 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 1,190% (46,578 vs 3,610 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; SlateDB is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, SlateDB 9%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | SlateDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 332 |
| 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 SlateDB if
- You want the SlateDB 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 SlateDB 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 SlateDB
Introduction SlateDB is an embedded storage engine built as a log structured merge tree. Unlike traditional LSM tree storage engines, SlateDB writes data to object storage (S3, GCS, ABS, MinIO, Tigris, and so on). Leveraging object storage allows SlateDB to provide bottomless storage capacity, high durability, and easy replication. The trade off is that object storage has a higher latency and higher API cost than local disk. To mitigate high write API costs (PUTs), SlateDB batches writes. Rather than writing every put() call to object storage, MemTables are flushed periodically to object storage as a string…
read the full SlateDB 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 SlateDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and SlateDB has 3,610. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and SlateDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and SlateDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and SlateDB?
Milvus is written in Go and SlateDB 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 SlateDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose SlateDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.