head to head · open source
Milvus vs rocksdb
Milvus has 46,153 GitHub stars, 4,256 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rocksdb has 32,108 stars, 6,931 forks, 1,645 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 44% (46,153 vs 32,108 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; rocksdb is written in C++ under GPL-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, rocksdb 22%. 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 | rocksdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 6.9K |
| 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 rocksdb if
- You want the rocksdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and rocksdb 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 rocksdb
RocksDB is an embeddable, persistent key value store written in C++ and developed by the Facebook Database Engineering Team. It is a library rather than a standalone server, and it forms the core building block for a fast key value server. The project builds on earlier work on LevelDB by Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean, and it lives in the systems infrastructure and database ecosystem, carrying the topics database and storage engine. It has been public for roughly fourteen years and is dual licensed under GPLv2 and Apache 2.0, so a user may select either license at their option.
read the full rocksdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or rocksdb more popular?
Milvus has 46,153 GitHub stars and rocksdb has 32,108. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and rocksdb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rocksdb under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and rocksdb?
Milvus is written in Go and rocksdb in C++. 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 rocksdb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,153 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rocksdb if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.