head to head · open source
Prometheus vs Milvus
Prometheus has 66,106 GitHub stars, 10,840 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus has 46,145 stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 43% (66,106 vs 46,145 stars). Prometheus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Prometheus has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, Milvus 9%. 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
| Prometheus | Milvus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 66K | ★ 46K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Prometheus if
- You weight community size — 66K 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 Milvus if
- You want the Milvus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Milvus fits your workflow better
About Prometheus
Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database, part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem. It collects metrics from configured targets at defined intervals, evaluates alerting rules, and visualizes results. Designed for reliability in dynamic environments, it operates without reliance on distributed storage, ensuring each server node functions independently.
read the full Prometheus overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or Milvus more popular?
Prometheus has 66,106 GitHub stars and Milvus has 46,145. Prometheus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Prometheus and Milvus free?
Both are open source. Prometheus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Milvus under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Prometheus and Milvus?
Prometheus is written in Go and Milvus 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, Prometheus or Milvus?
Choose Prometheus if you want the larger community (66,106 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Milvus if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.