head to head · open source
Milvus vs zookeeper
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. zookeeper has 12,807 stars, 7,320 forks, 242 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 260% (46,166 vs 12,807 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; zookeeper is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, zookeeper 57%. 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 | zookeeper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 7.3K |
| 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 zookeeper if
- You want the zookeeper 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 zookeeper 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 zookeeper
Apache ZooKeeper is an Apache 2.0 licensed Java coordination service, published from the apache/zookeeper repository, used by distributed systems to hold shared configuration, naming and synchronisation state.
read the full zookeeper 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 zookeeper more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and zookeeper has 12,807. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and zookeeper free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and zookeeper under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and zookeeper?
Milvus is written in Go and zookeeper 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 zookeeper?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose zookeeper if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.