head to head · open source
Milvus vs postgres
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. postgres has 8,745 stars, 402 forks, 303 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 432% (46,563 vs 8,745 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; postgres is written in JavaScript under Unlicense. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, 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 | postgres | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 8.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Unlicense |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 402 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Milvus if
- You weight community size — 47K 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 postgres if
- You want the postgres feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Unlicense license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and postgres fits your workflow better
About Milvus
What is Milvus? 🐦 Milvus is a high performance vector database built for scale. It powers AI applications by efficiently organizing and searching vast amounts of unstructured data, such as text, images, and multi modal information. 🧑💻 Written in Go and C++, Milvus implements hardware acceleration for CPU/GPU to achieve best in class vector search performance. Thanks to its fully distributed and K8s native architecture, Milvus can scale horizontally, handle tens of thousands of search queries on billions of vectors, and keep data fresh with real time streaming updates. Milvus also supports Standalone mode for…
read the full Milvus overview →
About postgres
🚀 Fastest full featured node & deno client 🏷 ES6 Tagged Template Strings at the core 🏄♀️ Simple surface API 🖊️ Dynamic query support 💬 Chat and help on Gitter 🐦 Follow on Twitter Getting started Installation Usage Create your sql database instance Simply import for use elsewhere ESM dynamic imports The library can be used with ESM dynamic imports as well as shown here. Table of Contents Connection Queries Building queries Advanced query methods Transactions Data Transformation Listen & notify Realtime subscribe Numbers, bigint, numeric Result Array Connection details Custom Types Teardown / Cleanup Error…
read the full postgres overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or postgres more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and postgres has 8,745. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and postgres free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and postgres under Unlicense. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and postgres?
Milvus is written in Go and postgres in JavaScript. 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 postgres?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,563 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose postgres if its feature set, stack or Unlicense licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.