head to head · open source
Milvus vs sled
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sled has 9,103 stars, 429 forks, 172 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 412% (46,578 vs 9,103 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; sled is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, sled 5%. 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 | sled | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 9.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-04-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 429 |
| 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 sled if
- You want the sled 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 sled 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 sled
key value documentation chat about databases with us sled it's all downhill from here!!! An embedded database. $${\color{red}This \space README \space is \space out \space of \space sync \space with \space the \space main \space branch \space which \space contains \space a \space large \space in progress \space rewrite }$$ If you would like to work with structured data without paying expensive deserialization costs, check out the structured example! features API similar to a threadsafe BTreeMap serializable (ACID) transactions for atomically reading and writing to multiple keys in multiple keyspaces. fully…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or sled more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and sled has 9,103. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and sled free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sled under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and sled?
Milvus is written in Go and sled 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 sled?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sled if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.