head to head · open source
Milvus vs tinkerpop
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tinkerpop has 2,153 stars, 866 forks, 32 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 2,063% (46,578 vs 2,153 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tinkerpop is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, tinkerpop 40%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | tinkerpop | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 866 |
| 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 tinkerpop if
- You want the tinkerpop feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and tinkerpop 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 tinkerpop
Apache TinkerPop Apache TinkerPop™ is a graph computing framework for both graph databases (OLTP) and graph analytic systems (OLAP). It provides the Gremlin graph traversal language, drivers, and tools for working with property graphs across a wide variety of underlying data systems. Project overview TinkerPop defines a common interface and language (Gremlin) so that applications can work against many different graph systems without being locked into a single vendor. It includes a reference in‑memory graph database (TinkerGraph), Gremlin Server, language variants, and a rich collection of recipes and…
read the full tinkerpop overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or tinkerpop more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and tinkerpop has 2,153. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and tinkerpop free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tinkerpop under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and tinkerpop?
Milvus is written in Go and tinkerpop in Java. 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 tinkerpop?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tinkerpop if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.