head to head · open source
Prometheus vs Milvus
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars, 10,969 forks, 890 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus has 46,563 stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Prometheus leads on adoption by 44% (66,906 vs 46,563 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%. Prometheus 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 | ★ 67K | ★ 47K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Prometheus if
- You weight community size — 67K 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 Visit prometheus.io for the full documentation, examples and guides. [ ][quay] [ ][hub] Prometheus, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts when specified conditions are observed. The features that distinguish Prometheus from other metrics and monitoring systems are: A multi dimensional data model (time series defined by metric name and set of key/value dimensions) PromQL, a powerful and flexible query language to…
read the full Prometheus overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Prometheus or Milvus more popular?
Prometheus has 66,906 GitHub stars and Milvus has 46,563. 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 (66,906 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.