head to head · open source
Milvus vs zeppelin
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zeppelin has 6,669 stars, 2,833 forks, 58 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 598% (46,578 vs 6,669 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; zeppelin is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, zeppelin 42%. 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 | zeppelin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 6.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.8K |
| 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 zeppelin if
- You want the zeppelin 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 zeppelin 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 zeppelin
Apache Zeppelin Documentation: User Guide Mailing Lists: User and Dev mailing list Continuous Integration: Contributing: Contribution Guide Issue Tracker: Jira License: Apache 2.0 Zeppelin , a web based notebook that enables interactive data analytics. You can make beautiful data driven, interactive and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala and more. Core features: Web based notebook style editor with real time collaboration Multi language support: Spark, Flink, Python, SQL, Shell, and 20+ interpreters Pluggable interpreter architecture with process isolation Built in visualization and dynamic forms Notebook…
read the full zeppelin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or zeppelin more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and zeppelin has 6,669. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and zeppelin free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and zeppelin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and zeppelin?
Milvus is written in Go and zeppelin 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 zeppelin?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose zeppelin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.