head to head · open source
Milvus vs pgcli
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. pgcli has 13,394 stars, 613 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 245% (46,166 vs 13,394 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; pgcli is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, pgcli 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 | pgcli | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 613 |
| 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 pgcli if
- You want the pgcli feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and pgcli 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 pgcli
pgcli is a Python command line REPL for PostgreSQL, distributed under the BSD 3 Clause licence, that replaces psql for interactive sessions by adding autocompletion and syntax highlighting for developers, DBAs, and analysts who work in a terminal.
read the full pgcli overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or pgcli more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and pgcli has 13,394. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and pgcli free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pgcli under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and pgcli?
Milvus is written in Go and pgcli in Python. 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 pgcli?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pgcli if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.