head to head · open source
Milvus vs TimescaleDb
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars, 4,257 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped today. TimescaleDb has 23,548 stars, 1,154 forks, 389 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Milvus leads on adoption by 96% (46,166 vs 23,548 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 | ★ 46K | ★ 24K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 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
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 TimescaleDb
TimescaleDB is a time series database built on top of PostgreSQL and packaged as a PostgreSQL extension. It lives in the PostgreSQL ecosystem, and it uses SQL and PostgreSQL clients such as psql and pgAdmin. The project targets high performance real time analytics on time series and event data, with repository topics for IoT, financial analysis, and historian workloads.
read the full TimescaleDb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or TimescaleDb more popular?
Milvus has 46,166 GitHub stars and TimescaleDb has 23,548. 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 (46,166 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.