head to head · open source
Milvus vs tbls
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tbls has 4,370 stars, 217 forks, 55 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 966% (46,578 vs 4,370 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 4.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 217 |
| 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 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
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 tbls
tbls (pronounced /ˈteɪbl̩z/) is a CI Friendly tool to document a database, written in Go. Key features of tbls are: Document a database automatically in GFM format. Output database schema in many formats. Single binary = CI Friendly. Support many databases. Work as linter for database Table of Contents Quick Start Install Getting Started Document a database Diff database and (document or database) Lint a database Measure document coverage Continuous Integration Configuration Name Description Labels DSN Support Datasource Document path Document format ER diagram Filter tables Lint Comments Relations Viewpoints…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or tbls more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and tbls has 4,370. 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 (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tbls if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.