head to head · open source
TiDB vs Weaviate
TiDB has 40,701 GitHub stars, 6,284 forks, 6,976 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Weaviate has 16,934 stars, 1,433 forks, 738 open issues and last shipped yesterday. TiDB leads on adoption by 140% (40,701 vs 16,934 stars). TiDB is written in Go under Apache-2.0; Weaviate is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence. TiDB has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, Weaviate 8%. TiDB 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
| TiDB | Weaviate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.3K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick TiDB if
- You weight community size — 41K 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 Weaviate if
- You want the Weaviate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Weaviate fits your workflow better
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…
About Weaviate
Weaviate Weaviate is an open source, cloud native vector database that stores both objects and vectors, enabling semantic search at scale. It combines vector similarity search with keyword filtering, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and reranking in a single query interface. Common use cases include RAG systems, semantic and image search, recommendation engines, chatbots, and content classification. Weaviate supports two approaches to store vectors: automatic vectorization at import using integrated models (OpenAI, Cohere, HuggingFace, and others) or direct import of pre computed vector embeddings…
read the full Weaviate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is TiDB or Weaviate more popular?
TiDB has 40,701 GitHub stars and Weaviate has 16,934. TiDB has the larger community by that measure.
Are TiDB and Weaviate free?
Both are open source. TiDB is licensed under Apache-2.0, and Weaviate has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between TiDB and Weaviate?
TiDB is written in Go and Weaviate 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, TiDB or Weaviate?
Choose TiDB if you want the larger community (40,701 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Weaviate if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.