head to head · open source
Milvus vs postgres
Milvus has 46,153 GitHub stars, 4,256 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. postgres has 8,730 stars, 374 forks, 303 open issues and last shipped 16 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 429% (46,153 vs 8,730 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 4%. 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 8.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Unlicense |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 374 |
| 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 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
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 postgres
Postgres.js is a full featured PostgreSQL client for JavaScript and TypeScript runtimes — Node.js, Deno, Bun and Cloudflare — published to npm as postgres , and it is aimed at developers who need to query a PostgreSQL database from application code without adopting a heavier ORM or query builder.
read the full postgres overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or postgres more popular?
Milvus has 46,153 GitHub stars and postgres has 8,730. 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 (46,153 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose postgres if its feature set, stack or Unlicense licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.