head to head · open source
Milvus vs postgres-operator
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. postgres-operator has 5,245 stars, 1,070 forks, 546 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 780% (46,166 vs 5,245 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 5.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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-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
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-operator
Postgres Operator is an MIT licensed Kubernetes operator, written in Go and developed at Zalando, that creates and manages highly available PostgreSQL clusters through Postgres manifests (CRDs), built for platform and infrastructure teams that want database as a service inside their own Kubernetes clusters.
read the full postgres-operator overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or postgres-operator more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and postgres-operator has 5,245. 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 (46,166 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.