MySQL Alternatives

MariaDB is an free and open-source, community-developed relational database management system. MariaDB is a fork of MySQL, and is developed and maintained by the creators of MySQL, after concerns over its acquisition by Oracle Corporation in 2009. The databases comes bundled by default with most Linux distributions and is also apart of most cloud offerings. MariaDB is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness which is ensured through the MariaDB Foundation.

MongoDB is an open-source document-oriented distributed database built for modern applications. MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas and is classified as a NoSQL database. The database is freely distributed under the Server Side Public License, but MongoDB provides commercial version of the database for enterprise-scale applications.

ArangoDB is a database system that was designed to support key/value, document, and graph data to be stored together, and queried via a unified language called AQL. The project is developed by ArangoDB GmbH, and released free and open-source under the Apache License 2.0. The universal "native multi-level" design of the database allows for a flexible approach when structuring and building an application, a feature that many have come to love.

PostgreSQL, or Postgres for short is a widely popular, free and open-source relational database management system. PostgreSQL is available for all major operating systems including macOS, Linux, Windows, BSD and Solaris. The project has been in active development for over 30 years now, and powers many of the applications you use on a daily basis.

CouchDB is a free and open-source document-oriented NoSQL database developed by the Apache Foundation. The database is written and implemented in the language Erlang and provides the use of multiple formats and protocols to store, transfer, and process data. With CouchDB you query data with JavaScript using MapReduce, and HTTP for an API. Which can be done across multiple distributed CouchDB instances as the database has the ability to synchronize multiple copies of the same database, across servers.

Redis is a free and open-source, in in-memory data structure store that can be used as a database, cache or message broker. The project is community developed and released under the BSD license. Redis supports common data structures including strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes with radius queries and streams.

A Chinese developed open-source NewSQL database that supports analytical processing and hybrid transactional workloads. TiDB is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and primarily developed by PingCAP, Inc. The database provides high availability with strong consistency and horizontal scaling and is compatible with MySQL.

OrbitDB is free and open-source serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database for IPFS (Internet Planetary File System). The database is most commonly used for decentralized apps (dApps) and blockchain applications. With OrbitDB, IPFS is used for data storage, while IPFS Pubsub is used to automatically sync databases with peers across the network. Which makes OrbitDB an "eventually consistent database" that uses CRDTs for conflict-free database merges, suited for decentralization of data.

TerminusDB is an open-source full-featured in-memory graph database management system that stores data like git.

SQLite is a free and open-source relational database management system that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. Rather than being a typical client–server database engine, SQLite is self-contained and can be embedded into applications. Making it perfect for development frameworks that want to provide a default database without setup, or applications that needs an embedded database. SQLite is built into all mobile operating systems and most computers and comes bundled with a countless applications. SQLite is also ACID-compliant and implements most of the SQL standard, generally following PostgreSQL syntax.

KeyDB is fast, free, and open-source NoSQL database with full compatibility for Redis APIs, clients, and modules. The database was originally forked from the Redis code-base and has been improved to handle multithreading, memory efficiency, and higher throughput. KeyDB is now a fully multithreaded and allow many machine cores to operate a single node resulting in 5X the throughput of Redis (v5) and up to 3x the throughput of Redis (v6). KeyDB also includes Redis Enterprise such as Active Replication, FLASH storage support, and other features like direct backup to AWS S3.

Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source, distributed, wide column store, NoSQL database management system. Apache Cassandra is designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. The database has become the choice of many organizations that need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. Apache Cassandra also provides support for replicating across multiple datacenters, providing lower latency for end users of Cassandra-powered applications.