head to head · open source
Milvus vs tinkerpop
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. tinkerpop has 2,146 stars, 864 forks, 32 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 2,051% (46,166 vs 2,146 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.
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Side by side
| Milvus | tinkerpop | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 864 |
| 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 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
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 tinkerpop
Apache TinkerPop is an open source graph computing framework that provides a common interface and traversal language for property graphs. It supports graph databases for transactional workloads and graph analytic systems for large scale analysis. The project lives in the Apache ecosystem, is implemented primarily in Java, and provides packages and drivers for several language environments.
read the full tinkerpop overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or tinkerpop more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and tinkerpop has 2,146. 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 (46,166 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.