head to head · open source
Milvus vs TiDB
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars, 4,325 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. TiDB has 40,701 stars, 6,284 forks, 6,976 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 14% (46,563 vs 40,701 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 | ★ 47K | ★ 41K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 6.3K |
| 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 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
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 TiDB
TiDB TiDB (/’taɪdiːbi:/, "Ti" stands for Titanium) is an open source, cloud native, distributed SQL database designed for high availability, horizontal and vertical scalability, strong consistency, and high performance. Key Features Quick Start Need Help? Architecture Contributing License See Also Acknowledgments Key Features Distributed Transactions : TiDB uses a two phase commit protocol to ensure ACID compliance, providing strong consistency. Transactions span multiple nodes, and TiDB's distributed nature ensures data correctness even in the presence of network partitions or node failures. Horizontal and…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or TiDB more popular?
Milvus has 46,563 GitHub stars and TiDB has 40,701. 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 (46,563 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.