head to head · open source
Milvus vs spicedb
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. spicedb has 7,077 stars, 421 forks, 157 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 552% (46,166 vs 7,077 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 421 |
| 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 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
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 spicedb
SpiceDB is an open source, Google Zanzibar inspired database written in Go that stores and queries fine grained authorization data, and it is built for platform and product teams that need a reliable answer to whether subject X can perform action Y on resource Z.
read the full spicedb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or spicedb more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and spicedb has 7,077. 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 (46,166 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.