head to head · open source
Milvus vs sled
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. sled has 9,093 stars, 427 forks, 172 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 408% (46,166 vs 9,093 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 9.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-04-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 427 |
| 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 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
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 sled
sled is an embedded key value database for Rust programs, written in Rust under the Apache 2.0 licence, aimed at developers who want a threadsafe, crash safe local store inside their own process instead of running a separate database server.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or sled more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and sled has 9,093. 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 (46,166 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.