head to head · open source
Milvus vs pg
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. pg has 5,783 stars, 415 forks, 124 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 698% (46,166 vs 5,783 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; pg is written in Go under BSD-2-Clause. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, pg 7%. Milvus was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (golang), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Milvus | pg | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-07-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 415 |
| 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 pg if
- You want the pg feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and 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 pg
go pg is a PostgreSQL client and ORM for Go that focuses on PostgreSQL specific features and performance, built for Go developers who want typed models and direct access to types such as hstore, jsonb, and multidimensional arrays.
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 pg more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and pg has 5,783. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and pg free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pg under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and pg?
Milvus is written in Go and 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 pg?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pg if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.