head to head · open source
Milvus vs QuestDB
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. QuestDB has 17,326 stars, 1,647 forks, 952 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 166% (46,145 vs 17,326 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; QuestDB is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, QuestDB 10%. QuestDB 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 | QuestDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 QuestDB if
- You want the QuestDB 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 QuestDB 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 QuestDB
QuestDB open source time series database. Java, Apache 2.0, category Infrastructure & Operations / Databases. Lives in open source database ecosystem for massive data scale, low latency, real time analytics.
read the full QuestDB overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or QuestDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars and QuestDB has 17,326. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and QuestDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and QuestDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and QuestDB?
Milvus is written in Go and QuestDB 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 QuestDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,145 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose QuestDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.