head to head · open source
Milvus vs tinydb
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars, 4,327 forks, 1,405 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tinydb has 7,576 stars, 645 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. Milvus leads on adoption by 515% (46,578 vs 7,576 stars). Milvus is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tinydb is written in Python under MIT. Milvus has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, tinydb 9%. 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 | tinydb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 645 |
| 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 tinydb if
- You want the tinydb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and tinydb 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 tinydb
.. image:: :height: 150px Quick Links Example Code Supported Python Versions Documentation Changelog Extensions Contributing Introduction TinyDB is a lightweight document oriented database optimized for your happiness :) It's written in pure Python and has no external dependencies. The target are small apps that would be blown away by a SQL DB or an external database server. TinyDB is: tiny: The current source code has 1800 lines of code (with about 40% documentation) and 1600 lines tests. document oriented: Like MongoDB , you can store any document (represented as dict ) in TinyDB. optimized for your happiness…
read the full tinydb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Milvus or tinydb more popular?
Milvus has 46,578 GitHub stars and tinydb has 7,576. Milvus has the larger community by that measure.
Are Milvus and tinydb free?
Both are open source. Milvus is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tinydb under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Milvus and tinydb?
Milvus is written in Go and tinydb in Python. 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 tinydb?
Choose Milvus if you want the larger community (46,578 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tinydb if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.