head to head · open source
Milvus vs spicedb
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. spicedb has 7,192 stars, 439 forks, 157 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 548% (46,578 vs 7,192 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; spicedb is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, spicedb 6%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cloud-native), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | spicedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 7.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 439 |
| 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 spicedb if
- You want the spicedb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and spicedb 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 spicedb
SpiceDB sets the standard for authorization that scales . Scale with Traffic • Dev Velocity • Functionality • Geography What is SpiceDB? SpiceDB is the most mature open source project inspired by Google's internal authorization system: [Zanzibar]. As of 2021, [broken access control became the 1 threat to web security according to OWASP][owasp]. With SpiceDB, platform and product teams can be be protected by answering this question easily: "can subject X perform action Y on resource Z?" Similar to a relational database, developers define a schema , write data in the form of relationships , and then use SpiceDB's…
read the full spicedb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or spicedb more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and spicedb has 7,192. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and spicedb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and spicedb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and spicedb?
Milvus is written in Go and spicedb in Go. 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 spicedb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose spicedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.