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AlmaLinux vs MySQL on Ubuntu comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 4, 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
17th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.3
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MySQL on Ubuntu
Ranking in Operating Systems (OS) for Business
28th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Reliable long-term hosting has reduced server migrations and lets me focus on projects
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. Better documentation on that part could be useful, although there is a lot of material out there. I choose a nine because nothing is ever perfect. For example, coming from Ubuntu, I found their firewall software easy to use, while with AlmaLinux's entire ecosystem, I always have to look up how to use firewall-cmd. These are just little preferences. I cannot think of anything else AlmaLinux could improve; it serves me well, and I have not been missing anything.
NP
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Database platform has supported secure ecommerce growth but still needs simpler scaling and monitoring
MySQL on Ubuntu can be improved in a couple of things in my mind. I can consider performance-wise, scalability-wise, reliability, availability, security, and operational simplicity. Right now it is good enough for ourselves or our organization. But if it is considered from a scalability perspective, currently, MySQL on Ubuntu scales fairly well. Write scaling is hard and manual sharding is required. In that case, what we can improve is native sharding support, better distributed write handling, and easier multi-primary setups. For performance optimization, I can say currently the limitation is the required expert tuning. The default configuration is conservative. What we need to do in that is auto-tuning based on the hardware, better index recommendations, and smarter query optimization. Another point is high availability. Currently, what happens is that replication setup is complex. If you make the setup but if you want to replicate it, it will be complex. What we have to do is build in automatic failover, easier cluster setup, and faster recovery time. The fourth thing is security enhancements. Currently, whatever security is set up is manual. Misconfiguration risk is there. What we can improve in that is secure-by-default configuration and mandatory SSL in production because SSL is very important nowadays. This thing we can improve. Stronger password policy by default. For the security perspective, we can provide a stronger password policy by default. For recovery and backup simplicity, I can say that currently, we need scripting for the backups and recovery testing is a manual thing. What we can do here is built-in backup scheduler. We can run one scheduler and every day it will take the backups. If we can have it, it will be great. One-click restore and automated recovery validation. Those things we can improve. Another thing is observability and monitoring. Currently, what happens is limited built-in visibility and external tools required for that. What we can do here is provide native performance dashboard, query heat maps, and bottleneck detection. Those things we can improve. Another thing I can consider is at the Ubuntu level. Because if you consider, the OS and DB configuration is disconnected and kernel tuning is also manual. What we can improve in that is DB-aware kernel tuning, better file system defaults for the DB workloads, and pre-tuned DB server profiles. I can say cloud-native enhancements. Right now we are working on a traditional architecture and manual cloud optimization. It would be better to have Kubernetes native auto-scaling and storage-aware tuning. Those can improve my area for that. Another thing is developer experience. Debugging a query is hard. Currently, if we are running on Ubuntu and code something, there are no other tools we are using. Debugging is very hard. Also, error guidance is limited. We can say that a clearer error message, query rewrite suggestions, and schema change safety checks by default. Those kinds of improvements we can do. I can say I mostly covered the improvements needed for MySQL on Ubuntu, but one thing I can say is that there is also some limitation on the governance and compliance base. Auditing needs configuration. Some configuration we need to read. Compliance reporting also is manual right now. We can improve that with built-in audit templates, compliance-ready modes we can provide, and easier data masking we can do. Those things we can add also.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AlmaLinux provides free updates and security, unlike Red Hat, where support must be purchased separately."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"MySQL on Ubuntu is a great platform to deploy your data as it integrates well with services for ETL, analytics, or even machine learning platforms, and we have not encountered a single downtime while achieving high scalability, availability, and strong data security within our VPC."
"MySQL on Ubuntu is the base for most of our applications that are based on Linux, so it is wonderful."
"I have saved a significant amount of time because it's faster to create features with machine learning since it's very fast, and so we get the result in a few seconds."
"MySQL on Ubuntu is very simple, easy, and quick to use for people with database expertise."
"MySQL on Ubuntu combination handles it in a very efficient way."
"MySQL on Ubuntu offers very good performance, it is secure, and it is easy to use."
"The primary aspect of MySQL on Ubuntu that I appreciate is that it is extremely reliable among the RDBMS that I have used, and another important quality is that it extends with volume very well as most RDBMS don't scale very well, but this one scales very well and has been very reliable and highly available."
"I appreciate MySQL on Ubuntu for its relational tables which are faster to read, contributing to the performance in simple applications."
 

Cons

"After six months of migration, we ended up using more resources for the same websites, and that's not acceptable."
"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 area for improvement with AlmaLinux is the use of SELinux to secure and harden my server, which I find to be a complicated beast."
"MySQL on Ubuntu can be improved because it has limited analytics query capabilities rather than other competitors."
"Currently, what happens is that replication setup is complex; if you make the setup but if you want to replicate it, it will be complex."
"I would say that MySQL on Ubuntu can be improved particularly in its scaling capabilities."
"Despite some issues such as security concerns when changing passwords which compromised the database, it remains a very good database engine."
"Integration is always important regarding operating systems and these types of products, so being able to integrate and export or import from JSON structures is very critical."
"Sometimes, if the indexing is not done very well, I have noticed slowness, but largely, it has performed pretty well."
"I cannot answer regarding improvements. As I said, I am not watching, and I don't know what is in between the application and the database."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AlmaLinux?
AlmaLinux is free of charge, which is why I chose this distribution. It offers an alternative to Red Hat, which is free only without support and updates. AlmaLinux provides free updates and securit...
What needs improvement with AlmaLinux?
It is hard to say what needs improvement because I am on the operations side and focus on installing servers and running our software.
What is your primary use case for AlmaLinux?
I use AlmaLinux as the base operating system for all of our Linux servers. Our environment includes use cases that range from a load balancer on the NGINX platform to our monitoring software, Check...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MySQL on Ubuntu?
My experience with the pricing is that we are using free.
What needs improvement with MySQL on Ubuntu?
I believe there could be improvements for MySQL on Ubuntu, particularly with AI integration in scripting tools such as GitHub Copilot, which provides examples and solutions for errors encountered d...
What is your primary use case for MySQL on Ubuntu?
I have used MySQL on Ubuntu over the years, and I am currently working with some Docker products, but most of my experience with Docker is over Windows, not Linux. Currently, I am not using MySQL o...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

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 Red Hat, Rocky Linux, Canonical and others in Operating Systems (OS) for Business. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.