Alternatives to PostgreSQL logo

Alternatives to PostgreSQL

MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, MongoDB, and SQLite are the most popular alternatives and competitors to PostgreSQL.
95K
79.6K
+ 1
3.5K

What is PostgreSQL and what are its top alternatives?

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions.
PostgreSQL is a tool in the Databases category of a tech stack.
PostgreSQL is an open source tool with 14.3K GitHub stars and 4.2K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to PostgreSQL's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to PostgreSQL

  • MySQL
    MySQL

    The MySQL software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software. ...

  • MariaDB
    MariaDB

    Started by core members of the original MySQL team, MariaDB actively works with outside developers to deliver the most featureful, stable, and sanely licensed open SQL server in the industry. MariaDB is designed as a drop-in replacement of MySQL(R) with more features, new storage engines, fewer bugs, and better performance. ...

  • Oracle
    Oracle

    Oracle Database is an RDBMS. An RDBMS that implements object-oriented features such as user-defined types, inheritance, and polymorphism is called an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). Oracle Database has extended the relational model to an object-relational model, making it possible to store complex business models in a relational database. ...

  • MongoDB
    MongoDB

    MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding. ...

  • SQLite
    SQLite

    SQLite is an embedded SQL database engine. Unlike most other SQL databases, SQLite does not have a separate server process. SQLite reads and writes directly to ordinary disk files. A complete SQL database with multiple tables, indices, triggers, and views, is contained in a single disk file. ...

  • Cassandra
    Cassandra

    Partitioning means that Cassandra can distribute your data across multiple machines in an application-transparent matter. Cassandra will automatically repartition as machines are added and removed from the cluster. Row store means that like relational databases, Cassandra organizes data by rows and columns. The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is a close relative of SQL. ...

  • Amazon Redshift
    Amazon Redshift

    It is optimized for data sets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions. ...

  • Firebird
    Firebird

    Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, MacOS and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981. ...

PostgreSQL alternatives & related posts

MySQL logo

MySQL

121.5K
102.7K
3.7K
The world's most popular open source database
121.5K
102.7K
+ 1
3.7K
PROS OF MYSQL
  • 800
    Sql
  • 679
    Free
  • 562
    Easy
  • 528
    Widely used
  • 489
    Open source
  • 180
    High availability
  • 160
    Cross-platform support
  • 104
    Great community
  • 78
    Secure
  • 75
    Full-text indexing and searching
  • 25
    Fast, open, available
  • 16
    SSL support
  • 15
    Reliable
  • 14
    Robust
  • 8
    Enterprise Version
  • 7
    Easy to set up on all platforms
  • 2
    NoSQL access to JSON data type
  • 1
    Relational database
  • 1
    Easy, light, scalable
  • 1
    Sequel Pro (best SQL GUI)
  • 1
    Replica Support
CONS OF MYSQL
  • 16
    Owned by a company with their own agenda
  • 3
    Can't roll back schema changes

related MySQL posts

Tim Abbott

We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks.

We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).

And then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our "unread messages" and "starred messages" indexes.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

See more
Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 23 upvotes · 2.3M views

Our most popular (& controversial!) article to date on the Uber Engineering blog in 3+ yrs. Why we moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL. In essence, it was due to a variety of limitations of Postgres at the time. Fun fact -- earlier in Uber's history we'd actually moved from MySQL to Postgres before switching back for good, & though we published the article in Summer 2016 we haven't looked back since:

The early architecture of Uber consisted of a monolithic backend application written in Python that used Postgres for data persistence. Since that time, the architecture of Uber has changed significantly, to a model of microservices and new data platforms. Specifically, in many of the cases where we previously used Postgres, we now use Schemaless, a novel database sharding layer built on top of MySQL (https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-one/). In this article, we’ll explore some of the drawbacks we found with Postgres and explain the decision to build Schemaless and other backend services on top of MySQL:

https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/

See more
MariaDB logo

MariaDB

15.9K
12.4K
468
An enhanced, drop-in replacement for MySQL
15.9K
12.4K
+ 1
468
PROS OF MARIADB
  • 149
    Drop-in mysql replacement
  • 100
    Great performance
  • 74
    Open source
  • 55
    Free
  • 44
    Easy setup
  • 15
    Easy and fast
  • 14
    Lead developer is "monty" widenius the founder of mysql
  • 6
    Also an aws rds service
  • 4
    Consistent and robust
  • 4
    Learning curve easy
  • 2
    Native JSON Support / Dynamic Columns
  • 1
    Real Multi Threaded queries on a table/db
CONS OF MARIADB
    Be the first to leave a con

    related MariaDB posts

    Joshua Dean Küpper
    CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 11 upvotes · 653.4K views

    We primarily use MariaDB but use PostgreSQL as a part of GitLab , Sentry and Nextcloud , which (initially) forced us to use it anyways. While this isn't much of a decision – because we didn't have one (ha ha) – we learned to love the perks and advantages of PostgreSQL anyways. PostgreSQL's extension system makes it even more flexible than a lot of the other SQL-based DBs (that only offer stored procedures) and the additional JOIN options, the enhanced role management and the different authentication options came in really handy, when doing manual maintenance on the databases.

    See more

    I'm researching what Technology Stack I should use to build my product (something like food delivery App) for Web, iOS, and Android Apps. Please advise which technologies you would recommend from a Scalability, Reliability, Cost, and Efficiency standpoint for a start-up. Here are the technologies I came up with, feel free to suggest any new technology even it's not in the list below.

    For Mobile Apps -

    1. native languages like Swift for IOS and Java/Kotlin for Android
    2. or cross-platform languages like React Native for both IOS and Android Apps

    For UI -

    1. React

    For Back-End or APIs -

    1. Node.js
    2. PHP

    For Database -

    1. PostgreSQL
    2. MySQL
    3. Cloud Firestore
    4. MariaDB

    Thanks!

    See more
    Oracle logo

    Oracle

    2.3K
    1.7K
    113
    An RDBMS that implements object-oriented features such as user-defined types, inheritance, and polymorphism
    2.3K
    1.7K
    + 1
    113
    PROS OF ORACLE
    • 44
      Reliable
    • 33
      Enterprise
    • 15
      High Availability
    • 5
      Expensive
    • 5
      Hard to maintain
    • 4
      Maintainable
    • 4
      Hard to use
    • 3
      High complexity
    CONS OF ORACLE
    • 14
      Expensive

    related Oracle posts

    Hi. We are planning to develop web, desktop, and mobile app for procurement, logistics, and contracts. Procure to Pay and Source to pay, spend management, supplier management, catalog management. ( similar to SAP Ariba, gap.com, coupa.com, ivalua.com vroozi.com, procurify.com

    We got stuck when deciding which technology stack is good for the future. We look forward to your kind guidance that will help us.

    We want to integrate with multiple databases with seamless bidirectional integration. What APIs and middleware available are best to achieve this? SAP HANA, Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB...

    ASP.NET / Node.js / Laravel. ......?

    Please guide us

    See more
    MongoDB logo

    MongoDB

    91K
    78.5K
    4.1K
    The database for giant ideas
    91K
    78.5K
    + 1
    4.1K
    PROS OF MONGODB
    • 827
      Document-oriented storage
    • 593
      No sql
    • 553
      Ease of use
    • 464
      Fast
    • 410
      High performance
    • 257
      Free
    • 218
      Open source
    • 180
      Flexible
    • 145
      Replication & high availability
    • 112
      Easy to maintain
    • 42
      Querying
    • 39
      Easy scalability
    • 38
      Auto-sharding
    • 37
      High availability
    • 31
      Map/reduce
    • 27
      Document database
    • 25
      Easy setup
    • 25
      Full index support
    • 16
      Reliable
    • 15
      Fast in-place updates
    • 14
      Agile programming, flexible, fast
    • 12
      No database migrations
    • 8
      Easy integration with Node.Js
    • 8
      Enterprise
    • 6
      Enterprise Support
    • 5
      Great NoSQL DB
    • 4
      Support for many languages through different drivers
    • 3
      Drivers support is good
    • 3
      Aggregation Framework
    • 3
      Schemaless
    • 2
      Fast
    • 2
      Managed service
    • 2
      Easy to Scale
    • 2
      Awesome
    • 2
      Consistent
    • 1
      Good GUI
    • 1
      Acid Compliant
    CONS OF MONGODB
    • 6
      Very slowly for connected models that require joins
    • 3
      Not acid compliant
    • 1
      Proprietary query language

    related MongoDB posts

    Jeyabalaji Subramanian

    Recently we were looking at a few robust and cost-effective ways of replicating the data that resides in our production MongoDB to a PostgreSQL database for data warehousing and business intelligence.

    We set ourselves the following criteria for the optimal tool that would do this job: - The data replication must be near real-time, yet it should NOT impact the production database - The data replication must be horizontally scalable (based on the load), asynchronous & crash-resilient

    Based on the above criteria, we selected the following tools to perform the end to end data replication:

    We chose MongoDB Stitch for picking up the changes in the source database. It is the serverless platform from MongoDB. One of the services offered by MongoDB Stitch is Stitch Triggers. Using stitch triggers, you can execute a serverless function (in Node.js) in real time in response to changes in the database. When there are a lot of database changes, Stitch automatically "feeds forward" these changes through an asynchronous queue.

    We chose Amazon SQS as the pipe / message backbone for communicating the changes from MongoDB to our own replication service. Interestingly enough, MongoDB stitch offers integration with AWS services.

    In the Node.js function, we wrote minimal functionality to communicate the database changes (insert / update / delete / replace) to Amazon SQS.

    Next we wrote a minimal micro-service in Python to listen to the message events on SQS, pickup the data payload & mirror the DB changes on to the target Data warehouse. We implemented source data to target data translation by modelling target table structures through SQLAlchemy . We deployed this micro-service as AWS Lambda with Zappa. With Zappa, deploying your services as event-driven & horizontally scalable Lambda service is dumb-easy.

    In the end, we got to implement a highly scalable near realtime Change Data Replication service that "works" and deployed to production in a matter of few days!

    See more
    Robert Zuber

    We use MongoDB as our primary #datastore. Mongo's approach to replica sets enables some fantastic patterns for operations like maintenance, backups, and #ETL.

    As we pull #microservices from our #monolith, we are taking the opportunity to build them with their own datastores using PostgreSQL. We also use Redis to cache data we’d never store permanently, and to rate-limit our requests to partners’ APIs (like GitHub).

    When we’re dealing with large blobs of immutable data (logs, artifacts, and test results), we store them in Amazon S3. We handle any side-effects of S3’s eventual consistency model within our own code. This ensures that we deal with user requests correctly while writes are in process.

    See more
    SQLite logo

    SQLite

    18.4K
    14.5K
    530
    A software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine
    18.4K
    14.5K
    + 1
    530
    PROS OF SQLITE
    • 162
      Lightweight
    • 135
      Portable
    • 121
      Simple
    • 80
      Sql
    • 28
      Preinstalled on iOS and Android
    • 2
      Tcl integration
    • 1
      Free
    • 1
      Portable A database on my USB 'love it'
    CONS OF SQLITE
    • 2
      Not for multi-process of multithreaded apps
    • 1
      Needs different binaries for each platform

    related SQLite posts

    Dimelo Waterson
    Shared insights
    on
    PostgreSQLPostgreSQLMySQLMySQLSQLiteSQLite

    I need to add a DBMS to my stack, but I don't know which. I'm tempted to learn SQLite since it would be useful to me with its focus on local access without concurrency. However, doing so feels like I would be defeating the purpose of trying to expand my skill set since it seems like most enterprise applications have the opposite requirements.

    To be able to apply what I learn to more projects, what should I try to learn? MySQL? PostgreSQL? Something else? Is there a comfortable middle ground between high applicability and ease of use?

    See more

    Hi all. I want to rewrite my system. I was a complete newbie 4 years ago and have developed a comprehensive business / finance web application that has been running successfully for 3 years (I am a business person and not a developer primarily although it seems I have become a developer). Front-end is written in native PHP (no framework) and jQuery with backend and where many processes run in MySQL. Hosted on Linux and also sends emails with attachments etc. The system logic is great and the business has grown and the system is creaking and needs to be modernised. I feel I would stick with MySql as DB and update / use Django / Spring or Laravel (because its php which I understand). To me, PHP feels old fashioned. I don't mind learning new things and also I want to set the system up that it can be easily migrated to Android/iOS app with SQLite. I would probably employ an experienced developer while also doing some myself. Please provide advice -- from my research it seems Spring/Java is the way to go ... not sure. Thanks

    See more
    Cassandra logo

    Cassandra

    3.5K
    3.5K
    505
    A partitioned row store. Rows are organized into tables with a required primary key.
    3.5K
    3.5K
    + 1
    505
    PROS OF CASSANDRA
    • 119
      Distributed
    • 97
      High performance
    • 81
      High availability
    • 74
      Easy scalability
    • 52
      Replication
    • 26
      Reliable
    • 26
      Multi datacenter deployments
    • 10
      Schema optional
    • 9
      OLTP
    • 8
      Open source
    • 2
      Workload separation (via MDC)
    • 1
      Fast
    CONS OF CASSANDRA
    • 3
      Reliability of replication
    • 1
      Size
    • 1
      Updates

    related Cassandra posts

    Thierry Schellenbach
    Shared insights
    on
    RedisRedisCassandraCassandraRocksDBRocksDB
    at

    1.0 of Stream leveraged Cassandra for storing the feed. Cassandra is a common choice for building feeds. Instagram, for instance started, out with Redis but eventually switched to Cassandra to handle their rapid usage growth. Cassandra can handle write heavy workloads very efficiently.

    Cassandra is a great tool that allows you to scale write capacity simply by adding more nodes, though it is also very complex. This complexity made it hard to diagnose performance fluctuations. Even though we had years of experience with running Cassandra, it still felt like a bit of a black box. When building Stream 2.0 we decided to go for a different approach and build Keevo. Keevo is our in-house key-value store built upon RocksDB, gRPC and Raft.

    RocksDB is a highly performant embeddable database library developed and maintained by Facebook’s data engineering team. RocksDB started as a fork of Google’s LevelDB that introduced several performance improvements for SSD. Nowadays RocksDB is a project on its own and is under active development. It is written in C++ and it’s fast. Have a look at how this benchmark handles 7 million QPS. In terms of technology it’s much more simple than Cassandra.

    This translates into reduced maintenance overhead, improved performance and, most importantly, more consistent performance. It’s interesting to note that LinkedIn also uses RocksDB for their feed.

    #InMemoryDatabases #DataStores #Databases

    See more
    Umair Iftikhar
    Technical Architect at ERP Studio · | 3 upvotes · 431.3K views

    Developing a solution that collects Telemetry Data from different devices, nearly 1000 devices minimum and maximum 12000. Each device is sending 2 packets in 1 second. This is time-series data, and this data definition and different reports are saved on PostgreSQL. Like Building information, maintenance records, etc. I want to know about the best solution. This data is required for Math and ML to run different algorithms. Also, data is raw without definitions and information stored in PostgreSQL. Initially, I went with TimescaleDB due to PostgreSQL support, but to increase in sites, I started facing many issues with timescale DB in terms of flexibility of storing data.

    My major requirement is also the replication of the database for reporting and different purposes. You may also suggest other options other than Druid and Cassandra. But an open source solution is appreciated.

    See more
    Amazon Redshift logo

    Amazon Redshift

    1.5K
    1.4K
    108
    Fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service
    1.5K
    1.4K
    + 1
    108
    PROS OF AMAZON REDSHIFT
    • 41
      Data Warehousing
    • 27
      Scalable
    • 17
      SQL
    • 14
      Backed by Amazon
    • 5
      Encryption
    • 1
      Cheap and reliable
    • 1
      Isolation
    • 1
      Best Cloud DW Performance
    • 1
      Fast columnar storage
    CONS OF AMAZON REDSHIFT
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Amazon Redshift posts

      Julien DeFrance
      Principal Software Engineer at Tophatter · | 16 upvotes · 3.1M views

      Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.

      I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.

      For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.

      Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.

      Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.

      Future improvements / technology decisions included:

      Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic

      As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.

      One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.

      See more
      Ankit Sobti

      Looker , Stitch , Amazon Redshift , dbt

      We recently moved our Data Analytics and Business Intelligence tooling to Looker . It's already helping us create a solid process for reusable SQL-based data modeling, with consistent definitions across the entire organizations. Looker allows us to collaboratively build these version-controlled models and push the limits of what we've traditionally been able to accomplish with analytics with a lean team.

      For Data Engineering, we're in the process of moving from maintaining our own ETL pipelines on AWS to a managed ELT system on Stitch. We're also evaluating the command line tool, dbt to manage data transformations. Our hope is that Stitch + dbt will streamline the ELT bit, allowing us to focus our energies on analyzing data, rather than managing it.

      See more
      Firebird logo

      Firebird

      81
      120
      9
      Relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix...
      81
      120
      + 1
      9
      PROS OF FIREBIRD
      • 3
        Free
      • 3
        Open-Source
      • 1
        Upgrade from MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL
      • 1
        Easy Setup
      • 1
        Great Performance
      CONS OF FIREBIRD
      • 2
        Speed

      related Firebird posts