MySQL vs. PostgreSQL

Name: What's the best RDBMS? PostgreSQL vs MySQL
Uploaded: 2021-04-02T17:00:59.000Z
Duration: 4 min 57 s
Description: MySQL and PostgreSQL are both popular open source database solutions. It can be tricky to determine which one is right for your business though. We go over the key features and best use cases for each tool.

MySQL

990 Reviews and Ratings

PostgreSQL

352 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
MySQL	Score 8.2 out of 10	N/A	MySQL is a popular open-source relational and embedded database, now owned by Oracle.	N/A
PostgreSQL	Score 8.8 out of 10	N/A	PostgreSQL (alternately Postgres) is a free and open source object-relational database system boasting over 30 years of active development, reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It supports SQL and is designed to support various workloads flexibly.	N/A

Pricing

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
MySQL	PostgreSQL
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	MySQL	PostgreSQL
Considered Both Products	MySQL Carlos Alberto Pedron Espinett Especialista de Desarrollo Chose MySQL The three are relational databases or managers for relational database (except for MariaDB whose approach is based on NoSQL models) with the ability to store large databases and respond to demanding business circumstances, however MySQL compared to Microsoft SQL Server … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose MySQL Of course compare to no SQL databases it's slower but there is a completely different use case for them... In my opinion it is better than PostgreSQL, it's easier to configure and has the same performance, or approximately the same. Of course Oracle Database is a way bigger … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose MySQL MySQL is relatively easier to use and than PostgreSQL or SQL Server; it's also cheap to use in production compared to SQL Server. For a beginner who wants to ship something quickly, MySQL is really suited for it. Incentivized Helpful? Rishabh Khanna Software Engineer Chose MySQL I have also used Microsoft SQL Server. It is quite similar to MySQL. However, MySQL has always been my first choice, I have been using it for a very long time. I have also worked with PostgreSQL in a DevOps project. It is good too but a bit hard to learn and understand. Incentivized Helpful? Kees-Jan Koster Systems Developer Chose MySQL I would say that in a Linux environment MySQL works great compared to both PostgreSQL and MS SQL. The added benefit compared to MS SQL is the low or absent licensing cost. As we use it mainly from PHP the programming interface is great for MySQL. PostgreSQL has many of the … Incentivized Helpful? Alok Pabalkar Co-Founder & CTO Chose MySQL SQLite - Is the goto DB for Mobile/Desktop Apps. Its not as elaborate as Mysql but since its a RDBMS it provides all the basic features and its lite. We use mysql at the backend and for desktop app we use SQLite postgres - Its a formidable opponent. It is fast and reliable and … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose MySQL MySQL was the first option due to the existing knowledge, and after using other databases, it also appeared to be the most predictable in terms of costs Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Consultant Chose MySQL Easy to administrate and manage Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose MySQL Rest all the big brand databases incure high licensing cost giving almost the same value that MySQL is giving being an open source database. Other databases like Oracle, MS SQL servers need extensive resource along with a huge team to manage those databases. However, thats not … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Director Chose MySQL We chose MySQL because of its open-source nature and its compatibility with various systems, languages, and databases. It is easy to use and fast. Additionally, it has been in the market for more than 30 years now which makes it a reliable option when compared to its … Helpful? Rohit Goyal Senior Associate Technology Chose MySQL So the main reason i would stack up Mysql from rest of the others is that it is open source which can be helpful for doing any POC on the products and learning new technologies and it is also compatible with all other softwares like Microsoft SQL serve and Postgre Sql Incentivized Helpful? Alena Burda Senior Software Engineer Chose MySQL MySQL is the best platform and it has the ability to even automate time-consuming tasks with a fully managed database service that has enhanced productivity. This tool keeps me up to date about any new features and through instant provisioning it is providing me fast delivery … Incentivized Helpful? Balázs Kiss Software Developer Chose MySQL A bit on the more complex side, but definitely one of the more popular solutions between our customers. As a stable alternative to the sometimes really pricy Oracle DB, it performed well for most of our not-database-heavy projects. It was a bit slower than no-SQL solutions on … Incentivized Helpful? Adolfo Maltez Administrador de Servidores Chose MySQL MySQL offers best conditions for a rapid adoption at the organization. Also because it's free software, you can scale up in implementations without worrying about licenses fees. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Manager Chose MySQL MySQL has a GUI which makes it easy for developers to work upon. It has all features like replication, backup and crash recovery. Also since it is freely available it becomes commercially feasible for people to use this DB. Also MySQL can be easily used as a back end for the … Helpful? Verified User Director Chose MySQL I selected MySQL for small and medium companies and software. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Consultant Chose MySQL For our needs, MySql was enough and it was better known than the others. Incentivized Helpful? GS Govind Sankar Specialist Master Chose MySQL Postgress, AuroraDB Incentivized Helpful? DF Doug Ford Director - Development/QA Chose MySQL MySQL is not used very often for ML. Incentivized Helpful? Aung Phyo Part-time Lecturer Chose MySQL We use MySQL because it's easy to set up and use. Incentivized Helpful? Luka Pavlovic Software Engineer Chose MySQL Faster and quicker to set up. Incentivized Helpful? Dharti Madeka Software Engineer Intern Chose MySQL I think it is easy to learn when someone with technical skills tries to connect with it, and it is easy to handle data. Incentivized Helpful? AV Andrei Volodin Research Engineer Chose MySQL MySQL is a most generic implementation of a database of a sort that is coherent with major designs of web engines and frameworks. As it works in cross-platform environments and easy to deploy it seems to be a competitive choice and prospective solution for integration into web … Incentivized Helpful? Kartik Chavan Data Science Trainee Chose MySQL Frankly, there is not much difference between MySQL, GoogleSQL, Dremel SQL, SQL, etc. The main differences would be the syntax and pricing. MySQL has a free version, and it includes loads of important features, which were good enough for my company. The User Interface was also … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose MySQL After Oracle bought MySQL, I have pivoted some projects to use MariaDB instead, which is a fork of MySQL and maintained by the community and original developers of MySQL. This is free under the GNU GPL, and is not impacted by decisions Oracle makes for MySQL. RDS has the … Incentivized Helpful?	PostgreSQL Richard Rout Software Developer Chose PostgreSQL They each have their pros and cons. MySQL is probably the other popular "free" alternative in this space, but it's not as popular or have as much community support as PostgreSQL. Microsoft SQL Server is amazing in the microsoft tech stack, but it's pretty useless and provides … Incentivized Helpful? Aaron Smith Senior Software Developer Chose PostgreSQL PostgreSQL is very similar to both MySQL and Microsoft's SQL Server. With no licensing costs, it's clearly a win against SQL Server, plus it can be run on either Linux or Windows. MySQL and PostgreSQL also have many similarities, however, PostgreSQL offers many more options for … Incentivized Helpful? Jacob Biguvu Database Engineer/DBA (Cloud and On-Premises) Chose PostgreSQL MySQL is also an open-source relational database management system. Both support ACID requirements, Full-text-search. Both are available for Cloud solutions. However, I would recommend PostgreSQL. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose PostgreSQL PostgreSQL has more features than MySQL, and it has better documentation. Microsoft SQL Server is more complicated to set up and administer, and its syntax is not as easy to write as PLPGSQL. Moreover, the built-in functions in PostgreSQL are better than what's on offer from MS … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Consultant Chose PostgreSQL PostgreSQL works better than MySQL for analytics workflows where a massively parallel processing database architecture is necessary. We used PostgreSQL because it allows better scalability for querying and data analysis compared to the transactional database MySQL that we use. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose PostgreSQL Faster than MySQL/MariaDB and obviously cheaper than Microsoft. Performance is amazing. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose PostgreSQL MySQL: As I mentioned before, MySQL has superior write performance. However, Postgres has super read performance and safer ACID transactions, i.e. less potential data loss. Elasticsearch: we use Elasticsearch to store free-form customer data, but that's a different use-case. … Incentivized Helpful? AB Arik Ben-Dov Founder & CEO Chose PostgreSQL Both Oracle and MS-SQL database option fell when we evaluated the effect on our overall solution cost to our customers. customer examine the overall cost of the solution they buy, selecting Oracle or MS-SQL would leave less money in our pockets. We are Linux based solutions and … Incentivized Helpful? Mark Mitchell Vice President of Information Technology Chose PostgreSQL Much more mature and stable when compared to MySQL with features such as MVCC, complex subquery plans, ORDBMS, and NoSQL support. With Oracle retaining rights to MySQL its future as an open database is less secure and is no longer in the hands of the community. PostgreSQL also … Incentivized Helpful? Valeri Karpov Principal Engineer Chose PostgreSQL When we were originally evaluating Redshift we ran into some issue with dates. Either way, Postgres is a better choice than Redshift because it avoids vendor lockin. We ended up choosing Postgres over MySQL because it was easier at the time to get a hosted Postgres cluster up … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Manager Chose PostgreSQL Postgres stacks up just [fine] along the other big players in the RDBMS world. It's very popular for a reason. It's very close to MySQL in terms of cost and features - I'd pick either solution and be just as happy. Compared to Oracle it is a MUCH cheaper solution that is just … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose PostgreSQL We evaluated both PostgreSQL and MySQL, two popular open source relational databases. While they are very similar in most areas, PostgreSQL's reliability and performance won us over, plus it has much better support from cloud vendors we also work with. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose PostgreSQL PostgreSQL is rich in features and free to use which is perfect for our organization. PostgreSQL is our goto RDBMS if we want to create an application or services backend with the database if there's no specific requirement. For example for the most important and largest … Incentivized Helpful? Anson Abraham Data Czar Chose PostgreSQL PostgrPostgreSQL as a transaction db engine against oracle and sql server works well. TPM wise compared to MySQL and MariaDB, on an evan scale. SQL function supports, far outweighs compared to MySQL and MariaDB. PG Extensions allow for flexibiltity and scalability. Allows … Incentivized Helpful? Aurpa Fiza Software Application Developer Chose PostgreSQL In this case, Postgres is preferred because it handles large data sets and requires fewer hardware resources than its competitor, MySQL. Compared to PostgreSQL, Microsoft products are excellent, but the installation process for MS SQL is lengthy. PostgreSQL has an advantage … Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose PostgreSQL MySQL is an Oracle product which has in itself some known issues due to that (support, contract terms). Based on my knowledge, PostgreSQL support everything that MySQL support (syntax wise) and it adds more improvements and syntaxes that make the life of database engineers and … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose PostgreSQL For our use cases, PostgreSQL is just as feature rich as other options, costs less, and is simple to get up and running. There is also a plethora of documentation to support it which makes it a great option for a small scale startup without needing high levels of expertise to … Incentivized Helpful? Moris Mendez Ing. de Sistemas Informaticos Chose PostgreSQL Although the competition between the different databases is increasingly aggressive in the sense that they provide many improvements, new functionalities, compatibility with complementary components or environments, in some cases it requires that it be followed within the same … Incentivized Helpful? AG Amit Gupta Head Product & Technology Chose PostgreSQL Object oriented approach Json data type support Timezone aware timestamps Incentivized Helpful? Adolfo Maltez Administrador de Servidores Chose PostgreSQL Its main characteristic is the integrity of the data. In addition, being free software, it has no costs associated with its license, which allows the number of installations to be scaled without problems. The technical staff quickly learns about its installation, configuration … Incentivized Helpful? Paul De Audney Senior Staff Engineer Chose PostgreSQL We selected PostgreSQL due to the number of employees who have used it in the past. The data consistency guarantees. The multiple transaction isolation levels support. Incentivized Helpful? Don Burks Technical Lead Chose PostgreSQL PostgreSQL outperforms every other option. It is faster, more flexible, more reliable, easier to maintain, and more consistent in behaviour than any of the other offerings. Incentivized Helpful? Josh Kramer Senior Software Engineer Chose PostgreSQL I think Postgres stacks up great against all modern database solutions and has continued to be a trend leader in this space. Incentivized Helpful? Balázs Kiss Software Developer Chose PostgreSQL It's a viable alternative, with a rich feature set and a reliable system. PostgreSQL is one of the best RDBMS's currently on the market in 2020, it serves just as well as a starter, PoC DB for any software idea as a final, highly valuable database solution for big systems. Incentivized Helpful? Arthur Zubarev Senior Data Platform Consultant Chose PostgreSQL PostgreSQL beats every other RDBMS offering for being truly Open Source. Since it does not belong to a specific company it is poised to remain as such for a long time to come. PostgreSQL has a huge user base and active community. The releases are coming out often with … Incentivized Helpful?

TrustRadius Insights
	MySQL	PostgreSQL
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published October 19, 2021

Best Alternatives
	MySQL	PostgreSQL
Small Businesses	InfluxDB Score 8.8 out of 10	InfluxDB Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	SQLite Score 8.0 out of 10	SQLite Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprises	SQLite Score 8.0 out of 10	SQLite Score 8.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	MySQL	PostgreSQL
Likelihood to Recommend	8.4 (146 ratings)	8.0 (55 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	9.0 (5 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Usability	7.9 (18 ratings)	8.3 (9 ratings)
Availability	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	7.0 (1 ratings)
Support Rating	9.0 (3 ratings)	9.3 (7 ratings)
Implementation Rating	8.0 (1 ratings)	9.0 (1 ratings)
Product Scalability	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	MySQL	PostgreSQL
Likelihood to Recommend	Oracle MySQL is best suited for applications on platform like high-traffic content-driven websites, small-scale web apps, data warehouses which regards light analytical workloads. However its less suited for areas like enterprise data warehouse, OLAP cubes, large-scale reporting, applications requiring flexible or semi-structured data like event logging systems, product configurations, dynamic forms. Incentivized Manidipa Kundu Data Analyst Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group PostgreSQL is best used for structured data, and best when following relational database design principles. I would not use PostgreSQL for large unstructured data such as video, images, sound files, xml documents, web-pages, especially if these files have their own highly variable, internal structure. Incentivized Ron Ballard Consultant and author Read full review
Pros	Oracle Stable - it just runs, with minimal downtime or errors Fast - well-structured data is quickly written and read Secure - MySQL is easy to keep data secure from people and applications that shouldn't see it Easy to use - SQL is industry standard so no problems with adding, editing and reading data stored in MySQL Incentivized CM Calum Morrison IT Manager Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group It works well with external data sources and runs on platforms with stable performance. Clients can rest assured that their personal information will be safe and secure. Many forums discuss setup and usage, and most are free. Adding tooling applications to a computer is unlimited. PostgreSQL runs on many OS platforms and supports ANSI SQL, stored procedures, and triggers. Aurpa Fiza Software Application Developer Read full review
Cons	Oracle Learning curve: is big. Newbies will face problems in understanding the platform initially. However, with plenty of online resources, one can easily find solutions to problems and learn on the go. Backup and restore: MySQL is not very seamless. Although the data is never ruptured or missed, the process involved is not very much user-friendly. Maybe, a new command-line interface for only the backup-restore functionality shall be set up again to make this very important step much easier to perform and maintain. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group Clearer indications on what is the query plan, to optimize the query More out of the box, Postgres specific, SQL functions It would be nice to have a more visual aid of the relationship between all tables, but possibly this depend more on the UI used Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	Oracle For teaching Databases and SQL, I would definitely continue to use MySQL. It provides a good, solid foundation to learn about databases. Also to learn about the SQL language and how it works with the creation, insertion, deletion, updating, and manipulation of data, tables, and databases. This SQL language is a foundation and can be used to learn many other database related concepts. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group As a needed software for day to day development activities Incentivized Ojoswi Basu Sr. Tableau Solution Consultant Read full review
Usability	Oracle I give MySQL a 9/10 overall because I really like it but I feel like there are a lot of tech people who would hate it if I gave it a 10/10. I've never had any problems with it or reached any of its limitations but I know a few people who have so I can't give it a 10/10 based on those complaints. Kenneth Hess Senior Systems Analyst Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group Postgresql is the best tool out there for relational data so I have to give it a high rating when it comes to analytics, data availability and consistency, so on and so forth. SQL is also a relatively consistent language so when it comes to building new tables and loading data in from the OLTP database, there are enough tools where we can perform ETL on a scalable basis. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Reliability and Availability	Oracle No answers on this topic	PostgreSQL Global Development Group PostgreSQL's availability is top notch. Apart from connection time-out for an idle user, the database is super reliable. Incentivized Ojoswi Basu Sr. Tableau Solution Consultant Read full review
Performance	Oracle No answers on this topic	PostgreSQL Global Development Group The data queries are relatively quick for a small to medium sized table. With complex joins, and a wide and deep table however, the performance of the query has room for improvement. Incentivized Ojoswi Basu Sr. Tableau Solution Consultant Read full review
Support Rating	Oracle We have never contacted MySQL enterprise support team for any issues related to MySQL. This is because we have been using primarily the MySQL Server community edition and have been using the MySQL support forums for any questions and practical guidance that we needed before and during the technical implementations. Overall, the support community has been very helpful and allowed us to make the most out of the community edition. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group There are several companies that you can contract for technical support, like EnterpriseDB or Percona, both first level in expertise and commitment to the software. But we do not have contracts with them, we have done all the way from googling to forums, and never have a problem that we cannot resolve or pass around. And for dozens of projects and more than 15 years now. Incentivized Javier Blanque Technology Risk and Information Assets Manager Read full review
Online Training	Oracle No answers on this topic	PostgreSQL Global Development Group The online training is request based. Had there been recorded videos available online for potential users to benefit from, I could have rated it higher. The online documentation however is very helpful. The online documentation PDF is downloadable and allows users to pace their own learning. With examples and code snippets, the documentation is great starting point. Incentivized Ojoswi Basu Sr. Tableau Solution Consultant Read full review
Implementation Rating	Oracle 1. Estimate your data size. 2. Test, test, and test. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group The online documentation of the PostgreSQL product is elaborate and takes users step by step. Incentivized Ojoswi Basu Sr. Tableau Solution Consultant Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Oracle MongoDB has a dynamic schema for how data is stored in 'documents' whereas MySQL is more structured with tables, columns, and rows. MongoDB was built for high availability whereas MySQL can be a challenge when it comes to replication of the data and making everything redundant in the event of a DR or outage. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group Although the competition between the different databases is increasingly aggressive in the sense that they provide many improvements, new functionalities, compatibility with complementary components or environments, in some cases it requires that it be followed within the same family of applications that performs the company that develops it and that is not all bad, but being able to adapt or configure different programs, applications or other environments developed by third parties apart is what gives PostgreSQL a certain advantage and this diversification in the components that can be joined with it, is the reason why it is a great option to choose. Incentivized Moris Mendez Ing. de Sistemas Informaticos Read full review
Scalability	Oracle No answers on this topic	PostgreSQL Global Development Group The DB is reliable, scalable, easy to use and resolves most DB needs Incentivized Ojoswi Basu Sr. Tableau Solution Consultant Read full review
Return on Investment	Oracle As it is an open source solution through community solution, we can use it in a multitude of projects without cost license The acquisition by Oracle makes you need to contract support for the enterprise version If you have knowledge about oracle databases, you can get more out of the enterprise version Incentivized Jose Manuel Ortega Software Engineer && Security researcher Read full review	PostgreSQL Global Development Group Easy to administer so our DevOps team has only ever used minimal time to setup, tune, and maintain. Easy to interface with so our Engineering team has only ever used minimal time to query or modify the database. Getting the data is straightforward, what we do with it is the bigger concern. It's free. You can't beat that. Incentivized Don Burks Technical Lead Read full review
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