head to head · open source
Milvus vs VictoriaMetrics
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. VictoriaMetrics has 17,731 stars, 1,743 forks, 800 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 160% (46,145 vs 17,731 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; VictoriaMetrics is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, VictoriaMetrics 10%. VictoriaMetrics 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | VictoriaMetrics | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 18K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 VictoriaMetrics if
- You want the VictoriaMetrics 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 VictoriaMetrics 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 VictoriaMetrics
VictoriaMetrics is time series database for metrics and logs. It is monitoring solution and database, written in Go, licensed under Apache 2.0. Category is Infrastructure & Operations / Databases. GitHub metadata lists 17714 stars and 1738 forks. Homepage is victoriametrics.com. It lives in infrastructure and operations ecosystem. Topic list includes Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, OTLP, Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, metrics, monitoring, observability.
read the full VictoriaMetrics overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or VictoriaMetrics more popular?
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars and VictoriaMetrics has 17,731. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and VictoriaMetrics free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and VictoriaMetrics under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and VictoriaMetrics?
Milvus is written in Go and VictoriaMetrics 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, Milvus or VictoriaMetrics?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,145 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose VictoriaMetrics if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.