head to head · open source
Milvus vs tbls
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. tbls has 4,345 stars, 210 forks, 55 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 963% (46,166 vs 4,345 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tbls is written in Go under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, tbls 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 | tbls | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 4.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 210 |
| 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 tbls if
- You want the tbls feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tbls 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 tbls
tbls is an MIT licensed, Go written command line tool that automatically documents a database schema as Markdown and other formats, aimed at developers, data engineers, and platform teams who want schema documentation generated, diffed, and linted inside continuous integration instead of maintained by hand.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or tbls more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and tbls has 4,345. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and tbls free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tbls under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and tbls?
Milvus is written in Go and tbls 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 tbls?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,166 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tbls if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.