head to head · open source
Milvus vs TimescaleDb
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. TimescaleDb has 23,795 stars, 1,184 forks, 389 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 96% (46,578 vs 23,795 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; TimescaleDb is written in C under a custom or non-standard licence. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, TimescaleDb 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 | TimescaleDb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 24K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 TimescaleDb if
- You want the TimescaleDb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and TimescaleDb 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 TimescaleDb
TimescaleDB is a PostgreSQL extension for high performance real time analytics on time series and event data Quick Start with TimescaleDB Get started with TimescaleDB in under 10 minutes. This guide will help you run TimescaleDB locally, create your first hypertable with columnstore enabled, write data to the columnstore, and see instant analytical query performance. What You'll Learn How to run TimescaleDB with a one line install or Docker command How to create a hypertable with columnstore enabled How to insert data directly to the columnstore How to execute analytical queries Prerequisites Docker installed on…
read the full TimescaleDb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or TimescaleDb more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and TimescaleDb has 23,795. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and TimescaleDb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0, and TimescaleDb has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Milvus and TimescaleDb?
Milvus is written in Go and TimescaleDb in C. 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 TimescaleDb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose TimescaleDb if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.