head to head · open source
Milvus vs cloudnative-pg
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. cloudnative-pg has 9,329 stars, 767 forks, 444 open issues and last shipped today. Milvus leads on adoption by 395% (46,166 vs 9,329 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cloudnative-pg is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cloudnative-pg 8%. 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 | cloudnative-pg | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 9.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 767 |
| 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 cloudnative-pg if
- You want the cloudnative-pg 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 cloudnative-pg 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 cloudnative-pg
CloudNativePG is an open source operator, written in Go under the Apache 2.0 licence, that manages the full operational lifecycle of PostgreSQL clusters inside Kubernetes for platform teams and Kubernetes administrators.
read the full cloudnative-pg overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or cloudnative-pg more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and cloudnative-pg has 9,329. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and cloudnative-pg free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cloudnative-pg under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and cloudnative-pg?
Milvus is written in Go and cloudnative-pg 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 cloudnative-pg?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cloudnative-pg if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.