head to head · open source
Milvus vs postgres-operator
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. postgres-operator has 5,270 stars, 1,079 forks, 546 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 784% (46,578 vs 5,270 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; postgres-operator is written in Go under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, postgres-operator 20%. 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.
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Side by side
| Milvus | postgres-operator | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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-operator if
- You want the postgres-operator feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and postgres-operator 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-operator
Postgres Operator The Postgres Operator delivers an easy to run highly available PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes (K8s) powered by Patroni. It is configured only through Postgres manifests (CRDs) to ease integration into automated CI/CD pipelines with no access to Kubernetes API directly, promoting infrastructure as code vs manual operations. Operator features Rolling updates on Postgres cluster changes, incl. quick minor version updates Live volume resize without pod restarts (AWS EBS, PVC) Database connection pooling with PGBouncer Support fast in place major version upgrade. Supports global upgrade of all…
read the full postgres-operator overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or postgres-operator more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and postgres-operator has 5,270. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and postgres-operator free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and postgres-operator under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and postgres-operator?
Milvus is written in Go and postgres-operator 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 postgres-operator?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose postgres-operator if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.