head to head · open source
Milvus vs toydb
Milvus has 46,595 GitHub stars, 4,328 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. toydb has 7,301 stars, 625 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 538% (46,595 vs 7,301 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; toydb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, toydb 9%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (distributed), 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 | toydb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 7.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 625 |
| 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 toydb if
- You want the toydb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and toydb 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 toydb
toyDB Distributed SQL database in Rust, built from scratch as an educational project. Main features: [Raft distributed consensus][raft] for linearizable state machine replication. [ACID transactions][txn] with MVCC based snapshot isolation. [Pluggable storage engine][storage] with [BitCask][bitcask] and [in memory][memory] backends. [Iterator based query engine][query] with [heuristic optimization][optimizer] and time travel support. [SQL interface][sql] including joins, aggregates, and transactions. toyDB is intended to be simple and understandable, and also functional and correct. Other aspects like…
read the full toydb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or toydb more popular?
Milvus has 46,595 GitHub stars and toydb has 7,301. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and toydb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and toydb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and toydb?
Milvus is written in Go and toydb in Rust. 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 toydb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,595 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose toydb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.