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MySQL vs Percona Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

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

MySQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
152
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (4th)
Percona Server
Ranking in Open Source Databases
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of MySQL is 11.4%, up from 10.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Percona Server is 2.4%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MySQL11.4%
Percona Server2.4%
Other86.2%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

Varuns Ug - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Developer at NIT
Reliable transactions have supported secure payments, refunds, and bookings at high volumes
Regarding MySQL improvements, a pain point is horizontal scalability. MySQL scales very well vertically and can support read replicas, but as a system grows significantly, sharding and distributed data management can become complex compared to databases that are designed to scale horizontally from the beginning. This is one of the areas where I think MySQL should work more. Another area is handling very large analytic workloads. MySQL is excellent for transactional systems, but for large-scale analytics or reporting, specialized analytic databases may sometimes be a better fit. Apart from that, one area is performance troubleshooting. As the database grows, diagnosing things such as slow queries, lock contention, and deadlocks becomes complex.
Pieter Geelen - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelancer at geelen.io
Reliable open-source database has supported our migration and improved e-commerce performance
Percona Server seems great to me overall. If I had to think of any small area for improvement for Percona Server, it would be around the proxy story. When adding a proxy to manage traffic better, we first tried SQL Proxy, but it never really worked for us, which was unfortunate because SQL Proxy offers better optimizations for read performance. We did have success with HAProxy, but it works on a network level, while SQL Proxy was designed to be SQL-aware and distribute parts of the query across the database cluster. The performance gain we were hoping for with SQL Proxy did not materialize, so we remained on the network level with HAProxy. Databases can be finicky regarding the performance they need. We had some disk I/O latency issues, which led us to use different types of nodes in our Kubernetes cluster where we provisioned Percona Server explicitly. There is a lot of IOPS happening under the hood, and while I suspect the application was not very efficient, it was also challenging to identify that we were experiencing performance issues due to disk performance. It would be helpful to clarify the metrics related to disk I/O latency so we could understand where our bottlenecks are.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"Fully scalable and stable SQL-based RDBMS, with a straightforward and easy setup."
"It has a community version, and when I have to create a new database, I have no problems with licenses."
"A lot of the software components have been trialed and tested for often more than 10 years."
"The solution is stable."
"Mysql is free : it's an open source project, so you can use it with no cost."
"MySQL is indeed the world's most popular open source database."
"Like other databases, it has a rich set of functions, such as stored procedures and its own procedural language, which is akin to Oracle SQL. It also has trigger and cursor commands you would expect with a good database language."
"After switching to Percona Server, we were able to resolve those issues quickly."
"In my use of Percona Server, I've found that the replication and High Availability features are the most valuable."
"Percona Server has positively impacted my organization because it is open source, and if the official MongoDB goes in different directions or makes its product expensive, we can still use Percona Server, which serves as a sort of safety net."
"Percona Server has positively impacted my organization by reducing downtime for applications and improving backup capabilities."
"We find the product mostly stable."
"Percona Server's scalability is very strong, as it features thread pooling for over 10,000 connections, scales out horizontally, and comes with XtraDB Cluster and ProxySQL, making it very effective."
 

Cons

"MySQL is missing some RDBMS features like stored procedures, foreign keys, transaction, rollback, and subselect, and it also does not support triggers."
"There are some issues with compatibility with Java environments that need to be improved. When Oracle bought this solution there were some driver changes that caused some issues with operations."
"It is not as powerful as SQL Server. It can be more powerful. It is not scalable and has certain limitations, which is not the case with SQL Server."
"The solution could improve the monitoring. At the present time, you need to use third-party monitoring solutions."
"I would like to see the automatic backup feature in the solution as well. Data is very important and we need to preserve it in a safe place. It would be good if MySQL can back up the data automatically."
"With time, we got version issues, as our DB engine was so old and not updated."
"The workbench could be improved. In particular, error messages can be improved, which are horrific and completely unhelpful. I'd like to see improved parsing of errors. When you write SQL and it crashes, it usually is something completely irrelevant and not helpful. I've started to use GPT 3.5 for finding out how to do things. I got to do something a bit different, and that I found to be very useful. If there was some way to tie it into one of the new AI tools, that would probably be a good idea."
"MySQL's performance requires attention. For optimal performance, one should review and sometimes revise the code, particularly when using server-side scripting."
"If I had to think of any small area for improvement for Percona Server, it would be around the proxy story."
"It doesn't reclaim disk space when rows are deleted."
"Percona Server could be improved by adding more advanced query fields, which would be very helpful."
"If Percona had flashback capabilities, it would be ideal."
"Percona Server could be improved to keep pace with other flavors of MySQL, such as MariaDB, and could pivot to be Percona Server for MariaDB given Oracle's reduced investment in MySQL recently."
"I also think there should be more use cases and documentation on deploying in Kubernetes with real-life examples, as currently, the documentation is minimal, making it difficult in a production situation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't pay for a license."
"We are using the free community version of the solution."
"There is no licensing fee."
"My company uses MySQL's corporate licenses."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"MySQL is very cheap. It could be free. It also has a yearly licensing option."
"We do have a couple of clients who choose to use the paid, enterprise version of the solution and who take full advantage of it."
"The solution does not come with a licensing fee."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Comms Service Provider
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business74
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise63
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Why are MySQL connections encrypted and what is the biggest benefit of this?
MySQL encrypts connections to protect your data and the biggest benefit from this is that nobody can corrupt it. If you move information over a network without encryption, you are endangering it, m...
Considering that there is a free version of MySQL, would you invest in one of the paid editions?
I may be considered a MySQL veteran since I have been using it since before Oracle bought it and created paid versions. So back in my day, it was all free, it was open-source and the best among sim...
What is one thing you would improve with MySQL?
One thing I would improve related to MySQL is not within the product itself, but with the guides to it. Before, when it was free, everyone was on their own, seeking tutorials and how-to videos onli...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Percona Server?
I do not have experience with pricing, setup cost, or licensing for Percona Server.
What needs improvement with Percona Server?
I believe it would be great to have tools to deploy Percona Server in Docker so that we can split a huge database server into many small servers, which are easier to maintain and delegate to junior...
What is your primary use case for Percona Server?
My main use case for Percona Server is deploying the community version without support to MongoDB servers in Kubernetes, and I also use Percona Server Exporter tools. Using Percona Server for deplo...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, Tumblr, Scholastic, MTV Networks, Wikipedia, Verizon Wireless, Sage Group, Glassfish Open Message Queue, and RightNow Technologies.
Pricefalls Marketplace, Micpoint, Rent the Runway, Transmart, Wattpad, Singular Group, Invoca, 3E
Find out what your peers are saying about MySQL vs. Percona Server and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.