head to head · open source
Milvus vs tile38
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. tile38 has 9,731 stars, 622 forks, 163 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 374% (46,166 vs 9,731 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tile38 is written in Go under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, tile38 6%. 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 | tile38 | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 9.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 622 |
| 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 tile38 if
- You want the tile38 feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tile38 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 tile38
Tile38 is an open source, MIT licensed, in memory geolocation data store and spatial index that doubles as a realtime geofencing server, written in Go and aimed at developers who need to store, query, and react to location data in real time.
read the full tile38 overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or tile38 more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and tile38 has 9,731. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and tile38 free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tile38 under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and tile38?
Milvus is written in Go and tile38 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 tile38?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tile38 if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.