head to head · open source
Milvus vs Weaviate
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Weaviate has 16,818 stars, 1,403 forks, 738 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 174% (46,145 vs 16,818 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Weaviate is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Weaviate 8%. Weaviate was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (hnsw, image-search), 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 | Weaviate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 Weaviate if
- You want the Weaviate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Weaviate 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 Weaviate
Weaviate open source vector database. Stores objects and vectors together. Lives in cloud native database and AI search ecosystem. Enables semantic search at scale. Combines vector similarity search with keyword filtering, retrieval augmented generation, and reranking in single query interface.
read the full Weaviate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Weaviate more popular?
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars and Weaviate has 16,818. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Weaviate free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Weaviate has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Milvus and Weaviate?
Milvus is written in Go and Weaviate 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 Weaviate?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,145 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Weaviate if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.