head to head · open source
Milvus vs TiDB
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars, 4,254 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. TiDB has 40,541 stars, 6,242 forks, 6,976 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 14% (46,145 vs 40,541 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; TiDB is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, TiDB 15%. TiDB was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cloud-native), 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 | TiDB | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 41K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 6.2K |
| 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 TiDB if
- You want the TiDB feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and TiDB 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 TiDB
TiDB is an open source, cloud native, distributed SQL database written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0, aimed at teams that need ACID transactions, real time analytics, and vector search at scale without data silos.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or TiDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,145 GitHub stars and TiDB has 40,541. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and TiDB free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and TiDB under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and TiDB?
Milvus is written in Go and TiDB 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 TiDB?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,145 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose TiDB if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.