head to head · open source
Milvus vs valkey
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. valkey has 27,603 stars, 1,521 forks, 894 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 69% (46,578 vs 27,603 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; valkey is written in C under BSD-3-Clause. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, valkey 6%. 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 | valkey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 28K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Milvus if
- You weight community size — 47K 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 valkey if
- You want the valkey feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and valkey fits your workflow better
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 →
About valkey
This project was forked from the open source Redis project right before the transition to their new source available licenses. This README is just a fast quick start document. More details can be found under valkey.io What is Valkey? Valkey is a high performance data structure server that primarily serves key/value workloads. It supports a wide range of native structures and an extensible plugin system for adding new data structures and access patterns. Building Valkey using Makefile Valkey can be compiled and used on Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD. We support big endian and little endian architectures…
read the full valkey overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or valkey more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and valkey has 27,603. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and valkey free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and valkey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and valkey?
Milvus is written in Go and valkey 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 valkey?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose valkey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.