head to head · open source
Milvus vs Neon Postgres
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. Neon Postgres has 23,114 stars, 1,100 forks, 558 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 100% (46,166 vs 23,114 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Neon Postgres is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Neon Postgres 5%. 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 | Neon Postgres | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 23K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-08-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 Neon Postgres if
- You want the Neon Postgres feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Neon Postgres 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 Neon Postgres
Neon is an open source serverless Postgres database platform. It separates storage and compute, and it substitutes the PostgreSQL storage layer by redistributing data across a cluster of nodes. The project lives in the Postgres and serverless database ecosystem.
read the full Neon Postgres overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or Neon Postgres more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and Neon Postgres has 23,114. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and Neon Postgres free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Neon Postgres under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and Neon Postgres?
Milvus is written in Go and Neon Postgres in Rust. 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 Neon Postgres?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Neon Postgres if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.