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AlmaLinux vs MariaDB on CentOS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 5, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AlmaLinux
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MariaDB on CentOS
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
21st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Operating Systems (OS) for Business category, the mindshare of AlmaLinux is 3.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB on CentOS is 0.2%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AlmaLinux3.8%
MariaDB on CentOS0.2%
Other96.0%
Operating Systems (OS) for Business
 

Featured Reviews

Naim Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at SMC Labs, LLC
Private cloud practice has become seamless and deployments run smoothly for my projects
I follow the documentation for AlmaLinux, which I believe could be more extensive for enterprise setups. My primary use case remains deploying private cloud infrastructure using OpenStack Yoga, thus suggesting improvements to cater to specific cloud instances like AWS Graviton or Azure NVMe. Driver or kernel updates for new hardware or cloud instances like AWS Graviton or Azure NVMe tend to arrive a little later in AlmaLinux than they do in the Red Hat distribution. Therefore, I suggest that faster releases of cloud-optimized images and updated hardware drivers could enhance AlmaLinux's competitiveness. Additionally, I find it sometimes difficult to find answers on forums due to the community not being as large as that of Red Hat or CentOS. My suggestion is to create an active forum or Q&A session where developers can directly address user problems, growing the community and providing optional enterprise support tiers for large organizations. Additionally, I have continued to consider improvements. For server administration and language runtime management, I encountered conflicts on production servers with older and newer versions of tools such as Python and Node.js. Simplifying the application space management would reduce the friction in multi-language development environments. Moreover, including more pre-configured or auto-remediation scripts like CIS Benchmark or STIG compliance would be immensely helpful for enterprise security hardening.
DM
Performance Testing And A PM Expert at ADM
Performance tests have been streamlined for analysis while query tuning still needs improvement
The technical support or community support for MariaDB on CentOS is bad. There is a main problem with all the companies that sell this kind of tool and services. The first level of support is the first one you reach. When you begin to have a more difficult problem, there is no one available because sometimes you need to update the call and recall on it. This is not good because when we have some big problem on the database, we need to have a database administrator, not a person who reads instructions on the screen. It is always the same problem. My rating is two.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Positively, I can say that AlmaLinux has brought a sense of stability, and besides the security patches, we also noticed better virtualization for our use cases."
"AlmaLinux provides an enterprise-ready operating system without any subscription and cost, with long support from the community and vendor, good documentation, and community support that makes it suitable for production environments to host applications and databases."
"AlmaLinux has impacted our organization positively by providing a stable and reliable enterprise Linux platform without licensing cost."
"Any Linux distribution can be shifted to AlmaLinux, as it is very good to use and easy to manage."
"The most valuable feature I find in AlmaLinux is the binary compatibility with RHEL and the long-term stability, which makes it a predictable, rock-solid system behavior, while also having small and safe packaging for subsystems or systems that run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."
"AlmaLinux is lightweight, so my hardware resource usage is very low, and I am able to use it effectively."
"Overall, AlmaLinux is really good, easier as well, and I do not see much difference between CentOS and AlmaLinux."
"The long-term support provided by AlmaLinux helps my business by ensuring that we do not have to renew our servers every four to five years."
"MariaDB on CentOS is almost identical to MySQL, and the experience is very similar."
"With 10 years of experience with the product, I think the biggest advantage is that it is easier to maintain than Oracle."
"MariaDB on CentOS has positively impacted our organization in several ways."
"MariaDB on CentOS is effective in handling large data volumes; I have installed approximately 10,000 devices and it is working well."
"MariaDB on CentOS is a very good SQL database that is open source, meaning no license cost for users."
"MariaDB on CentOS is faster than Oracle."
"MariaDB on CentOS has positively impacted my organization by providing more features compared to Oracle MySQL, particularly in terms of performance, advantages, and implemented features, leading to migrations from Oracle MySQL to MariaDB on CentOS."
 

Cons

"After six months of migration, we ended up using more resources for the same websites, and that's not acceptable."
"It is not supporting the latest hardware, so that is not good."
"AlmaLinux could be improved by enhancing security and increasing speed."
"Regarding my experience today, I installed AlmaLinux 8, and everything is okay, but the significant problem is that AlmaLinux does not ship with Wi-Fi drivers."
"We feel they are not taking ownership of addressing a lot of vulnerabilities in some operating systems that are not patched even though fixes are available in open sources."
"One area for improvement with AlmaLinux is the use of SELinux to secure and harden my server, which I find to be a complicated beast."
"AlmaLinux could be improved by having some basic components, such as ifconfig and netstat, pre-installed on the container image, as that would be really helpful for us."
"If AlmaLinux could provide ten to twenty years of fixes, that would be an improvement because I do not want to update the system all the time, as it becomes more challenging for me as a system administrator to track all the patches and everything I should patch on the system."
"One of the things that is not ideal is that the version which is default is sometimes older than the very latest."
"I think MariaDB on CentOS needs improvements in some memory-level implementations within the operating system, as I have noticed issues related to memory orientation, such as out-of-memory problems."
"The technical support or community support for MariaDB on CentOS is bad."
"You can always improve a product, and the area that is very sensitive in MariaDB on CentOS is the release and the backward compatibility."
"Many functionalities are not available in MariaDB on CentOS, so those aspects needed to be rewritten, particularly Oracle proprietary features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
9%
Construction Company
39%
Transportation Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlmaLinux?
Currently, we have not experienced pricing with AlmaLinux, as I have used the free version so far. However, when we move to the production environment, I am suggesting that we implement AlmaLinux t...
What needs improvement with AlmaLinux?
In terms of how AlmaLinux can be improved, while I praise the patching part, the support provided by TuxCare needs to be more prompt and responsive. We feel they are not taking ownership of address...
What is your primary use case for AlmaLinux?
My main use case for AlmaLinux is to build a custom image on top of the AlmaLinux image provided by TuxCare. I use that custom image to supply it through all the stakeholders, for example, differen...
What is your primary use case for MariaDB on CentOS?
I always use MariaDB on CentOS for performance testing, as my main job is to analyze all the issues after the load test. Performance testing is the central use case.
What advice do you have for others considering MariaDB on CentOS?
I am working with some testing tools today, and it is always the same tools. The big ones are LoadRunner and NeoLoad, and for APM I use Dynatrace. I also work with Grafana, but LoadRunner is my pri...
 

Also Known As

AlmaLinux OS 8 (x86_64), AlmaLinux OS 10 (x86_64)
No data available
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about AlmaLinux vs. MariaDB on CentOS and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.