Open-Source Database Software
Open-Source Database Software Overview
Top Rated Open-Source Database Products

These products won a Top Rated award for having excellent customer satisfaction ratings. The list is based purely on reviews; there is no paid placement, and analyst opinions do not influence the rankings. Read more about the Top Rated criteria.
Open-Source Database Software TrustMap

TrustMaps are two-dimensional charts that compare products based on trScore and research frequency by prospective buyers. Products must have 10 or more ratings to appear on this TrustMap.
Open-Source Database Products
(1-25 of 44) Sorted by Most Reviews
The list of products below is based purely on reviews (sorted from most to least). There is no paid placement and analyst opinions do not influence their rankings. Here is our Promise to Buyers to ensure information on our site is reliable, useful, and worthy of your trust.
Couchbase provides a cloud database that offers the capabilities required for business-critical applications on a scalable and available platform. Couchbase is built on open standards, and aims to combine the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL in order to simplify…
Key Features
- Availability (96)92%9.2
- Scalability (95)87%8.7
- Performance (97)87%8.7
MongoDB (from "humongous") is an open source document-oriented database system developed and supported by 10gen. It is part of the NoSQL family of database systems. Instead of storing data in tables as is done in a "classical" relational database, MongoDB stores structured data as…
Key Features
- Availability (38)94%9.4
- Performance (38)90%9.0
- Concurrency (38)83%8.3
Key Features
- Performance (69)100%10.0
- Scalability (69)92%9.2
- Availability (69)90%9.0
Key Features
- Availability (5)88%8.8
- Performance (5)85%8.5
- Concurrency (5)76%7.6
The Apache HBase project's goal is the hosting of very large tables -- billions of rows X millions of columns -- atop clusters of commodity hardware. Apache HBase is an open-source, distributed, versioned, non-relational database modeled after Google's Bigtable.
Key Features
- Availability (5)78%7.8
- Performance (5)71%7.1
- Concurrency (5)70%7.0
Learn More About Open-Source Database Software
What is Open-Source Database Software?
Traditionally, databases have been proprietary tools provided by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and a number of other smaller vendors. Over recent years though, and especially for new projects, open source databases and database management tools have steadily grown in maturity and importance. In many cases, open-source database software includes both database software, and the database management tools needed to support the database.
As open-source databases become adopted by more and more companies for large-scale enterprise projects, there has been a concomitant rise in the availability of skilled DBAs, with extensive knowledge of these platforms to be able to assist with mission-critical deployments.
In addition to the obvious cost savings, open source database software have largely reached feature parity with their proprietary cousins. The open-source model also allows for heavy customization and community development, which makes the software very flexible compared to proprietary database software. Training materials are also often provided for free by user communities.
Open-Source Database Software Features & Capabilities
Some of the most common features provided by open-source database software include:
Relational and Nonrelational Databases
Support for Multiple Platforms
Supports databases and database management
Data Security
Data Collaboration
Pricing Information
All open-source database software options are available for free to businesses that can support them independently. That said, a number of open-source database options offer paid support, hosting, or monitoring. Pricing depends highly on which features are needed by the organization.
Related Categories
Frequently Asked Questions
When is an open-source database better than a proprietary database?
What are the best open-source database software options?
The Top Rated open-source database software options are as follows.