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MySQL on Ubuntu vs TiDB Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
3.9
Automation significantly saved time, improved compliance, and reduced costs with increased speed and minimal personnel required.
Sentiment score
3.8
Organizations saw strong ROI with TiDB Cloud due to reduced sharding, infrastructure, and monitoring costs, enhancing financial returns.
The audit trail MySQL provided also meant zero untracked data losses in production.
AI Engineer at a educational organization with 51-200 employees
I have seen a return on investment with MySQL on Ubuntu because I can say that everything we can do here is save money and time, and even we are using a small number of team to handle it.
Senior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have indeed seen a return on investment, particularly in time saved, as using MySQL on Ubuntu has proven to be 15 to 20% quicker than building a Postgres database.
Cloud Ops Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Before, the team had to maintain complex sharding logic, but after TiDB Cloud, it was a simple architecture with automatic sharding.
Software developer at Student
I see a return on investment with TiDB Cloud as we reduce the time spent on maintaining and monitoring since everything is automated, including the auto-scaling feature when large workloads arise.
database administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
4.9
MySQL on Ubuntu offers robust community support, reliable documentation, and paid services, ensuring positive customer service experiences.
Sentiment score
6.1
TiDB Cloud offers quick, responsive support for paid users, while free users rely on community and documentation for help.
I used AWS support, and they are very quick to respond.
Cloud Ops Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Whenever we can, we call the support and they fix the problem right away.
IT Administrator at a university with 51-200 employees
GitHub Copilot provides substantial information that helps when encountering errors.
Erp Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
When I submitted bug reports, the community provided solutions within three business days.
database administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I would rate the customer support a ten.
PM at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
There was 24/7 support available with quick response times and dedicated support engineers.
Software developer at Student
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
MySQL on Ubuntu efficiently handles increased loads with strong query performance, clustering, and cost-effectiveness, though scaling requires planning.
Sentiment score
7.9
TiDB Cloud's scalable infrastructure offers seamless growth, automatic workload adjustments, and DBA-friendly node addition for optimal performance.
When running on EC2 instances, for example, I can scale it from zero to 10,000 machines or even higher.
Cloud Ops Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Clustering is useful because that helps with high availability and scalability.
CEO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
MySQL on Ubuntu provides excellent reliability for scalability needs.
Senior software developer at Simplifyvms
Query speed and latency for OLTP is typically a few milliseconds, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of QPS.
Software developer at Student
TiDB Cloud is a very good choice when you are handling a massive set of data and also want high performance, easy scaling, and high availability.
Senior Software Enginer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
The scalability of TiDB Cloud is automatically configured, allowing it to scale out when workloads increase and automatically scale in when workloads decrease.
database administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
MySQL on Ubuntu delivers stable, reliable performance with consistent uptime, efficiently managing concurrent workflows and diverse automation jobs.
Sentiment score
8.1
TiDB Cloud is stable and reliable with good performance, featuring multi-replica storage and automatic failover across availability zones.
MySQL on Ubuntu uses the InnoDB engine, which has ACID properties integrated.
Senior software developer at Simplifyvms
After optimizing our setup with proper replication, automated backups, and monitoring in place, we brought that down to almost zero.
Support Escalation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
In real-world production use, it has been consistently proven across startups, mid-sized companies, and large organizations as well.
Senior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
TiDB Cloud is considered stable and production-grade when deployed correctly.
Software developer at Student
The performance of TiDB Cloud is very good under heavy workloads and spikes in traffic.
Senior Software Enginer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
TiDB Cloud is stable based on our deployments.
database administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
 

Room For Improvement

MySQL on Ubuntu struggles with large JSON data, requires scaling strategies, and needs better security, monitoring, and AI integration.
TiDB Cloud needs performance, usability, and compatibility improvements to address interface, cost, and debugging challenges for better user experience.
Scaling out is much harder to do. Even though a master-slave setup can help maintain a real-time backup or offload queries, achieving true horizontal scaling with numerous nodes at once can be tricky with MySQL on Ubuntu.
Cloud Ops Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
A more self-tuning approach to index optimization and query execution would reduce that burden, particularly for teams that focus more on application logic than database administration.
AI Engineer at a educational organization with 51-200 employees
A more polished and integrated web-based management interface, something built in by default, similar to what phpMyAdmin offers but more modern and secure out of the box, would be a welcome addition for teams managing remote Ubuntu servers.
Support Escalation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
If you do not have an option to have a replication from MySQL to TiDB, you can go ahead and simply use TiDB Cloud because it is far more efficient than maintaining TiDB on-premises.
Senior DBA at Mafiree
TiDB Cloud would benefit from better real-time query debugging tools that can clearly explain why a distributed query is slow and suggest optimizations automatically.
Data analyst at a non-profit with 51-200 employees
Use TiFlash replicas for heavy analytic workloads.
Software developer at Student
 

Setup Cost

MySQL on Ubuntu is cost-effective, reducing expenses in licensing, setup, maintenance, hardware, and operational costs for enterprises.
Enterprise users value TiDB Cloud's flexible, usage-based pricing, low setup costs, and functional features without license fees for scalability.
Since MySQL on Ubuntu is quite lean, it results in low operational costs, making it favorable from a pricing perspective.
Cloud Ops Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
We can reduce licensing cost saving with MySQL on Ubuntu because there is no cost.
Senior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The main pricing models are that TiDB Cloud itself is free, and you pay for infrastructure and storage.
Software developer at Student
TiDB Cloud's pricing is generally flexible and usage-based, which works well for us because we could scale costs with workload.
Data analyst at a non-profit with 51-200 employees
I do not know how TiDB is with vector tables, but I know they are somewhat in vogue right now thanks to the AI boom.
Senior Solo Contributor Full-Stack Engineer at Casafari
 

Valuable Features

MySQL on Ubuntu offers reliability, performance, scalability, security, easy installation, low resources, and extensive community support for data management.
TiDB Cloud offers scalable, MySQL-compatible, high-availability features that simplify management and reduce costs, supporting transactional and analytical workloads efficiently.
It extends with volume very well. Most RDBMS don't scale very well, but this one scales very well and has been very reliable and highly available.
CEO at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
By putting it in MySQL on Ubuntu, even if the node went down, the database would come back up.
Chief Data Strategy and Governance Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Since our EC2 instance is deployed in a virtual private network with MySQL on Ubuntu installed, it is protected from unauthorized access and use, and we have also encrypted the data in MySQL.
Senior Data Engineer at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
The ability to reuse information across documents helps my team as it saves time and reduces errors because we do not have to rewrite the same information anymore.
PM at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
You can scale TiDB Cloud simply by adding more nodes with no manual sharding.
Software developer at Student
The best feature TiDB Cloud offers is that whenever we want to scale up or scale out our database, it is very simple—just a simple click, and it will scale out automatically.
Senior Software Enginer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

MySQL on Ubuntu
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Operating Systems (OS) for Business (18th)
TiDB Cloud
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

MySQL on Ubuntu and TiDB Cloud aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. MySQL on Ubuntu is designed for Operating Systems (OS) for Business and holds a mindshare of 0.2%.
TiDB Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on Database as a Service (DBaaS), holds 2.2% mindshare.
Operating Systems (OS) for Business Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MySQL on Ubuntu0.2%
Rocky Linux8.2%
Ubuntu Linux8.0%
Other83.6%
Operating Systems (OS) for Business
Database as a Service (DBaaS) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
TiDB Cloud2.2%
Amazon RDS11.9%
MongoDB Atlas11.4%
Other74.5%
Database as a Service (DBaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Pranay Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior software developer at Simplifyvms
Reliable data platform has improved uptime and reduced infrastructure and licensing costs
MySQL on Ubuntu is an open-source relational database management system that stores data in tables and columns. It is free, open-source, and very stable for servers with easy installation for our production application. MySQL on Ubuntu demonstrates excellent stability and works very effectively with our Node.js backend. It is memory and disk efficient while providing regular security and bug updates. From an organizational perspective, MySQL on Ubuntu offers significant advantages. The cost is excellent since it is open-source with no licensing fees. The reliability it provides is outstanding with minimal crashes and exceptional stability. The improved application performance is notable with fast query searches and superior indexing properties. MySQL on Ubuntu saves considerable time and reduces operational costs through decreased database licensing fees as an open-source solution. We achieve a thirty to sixty percent reduction in infrastructure costs. System uptime is excellent in our stable Linux environment, reaching 99.9 percent uptime. Application performance improvements are substantial, delivering twenty-five to forty percent faster API responses when queries are optimized according to our needs.
Ece Ece - PeerSpot reviewer
Software developer at Student
Hybrid workloads have powered real-time analytics and simplified scaling for critical services
TiDB Cloud offers horizontal scalability. You can scale TiDB Cloud simply by adding more nodes with no manual sharding. That is a significant advantage over traditional MySQL setups. It also supports MySQL compatibility, as it supports the MySQL protocol and syntax. It has hybrid transactional and analytical processing for real-time analytics on data, so no separate data warehouse is needed. It supports ACID transactions and high availability. Another feature of TiDB Cloud is the cloud-native design. It works smoothly with modern infrastructures such as elastic scaling, container-ready orchestration, and microservice architecture. It separates the SQL layer from the storage layer for independent scaling and a flexible architecture. It is an enterprise-grade design. TiDB Cloud has positively impacted my organization, especially where massive scale and real-time analytics were needed. It powers core cloud services. We have used HTAP workloads, what we call STAP workloads, or the cloud-managed service. My job was to handle the cloud network for financial data.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
25%
University
11%
Healthcare Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MySQL on Ubuntu?
Regarding pricing and licensing, I use the free tier, so I don't know much about pricing.
What needs improvement with MySQL on Ubuntu?
Several pain points regarding MySQL on Ubuntu come to mind. First, its handling of large JSON documents was sometimes cumbersome. We stored structured financial data and occasionally had to denorma...
What is your primary use case for MySQL on Ubuntu?
MySQL on Ubuntu served as the primary storage and management system for structured financial data extracted from documents in our financial mapping system. We stored trial balances, entries, accoun...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TiDB Cloud?
I do not know how TiDB is with vector tables, but I know they are somewhat in vogue right now thanks to the AI boom. However, the boom seems to be gradually fading, and vector tables may not be nee...
What needs improvement with TiDB Cloud?
From my point of view, TiDB Cloud requires more nodes to run the environment because for a self-hosted environment it needs to deploy three PD, three TiKV, and two TiFlash minimum. I think this is ...
What is your primary use case for TiDB Cloud?
I use TiDB Cloud for my PAT environment to test some features in TiDB. I have used TiDB Cloud to test TiFlash and TiKV performance and compare that with PostgreSQL, which I am currently working wit...
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Rocky Linux, Canonical and others in Operating Systems (OS) for Business. Updated: May 2026.
896,387 professionals have used our research since 2012.