MySQL vs PostgreSQL comparison

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MySQL

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

PostgreSQL and MySQL are major competitors in the relational database management systems category. PostgreSQL seems to have the upper hand in terms of feature richness and community support, while MySQL is noted for its speed and lower hardware demands.

Features: PostgreSQL is distinguished by its spatial support, advanced indexing algorithms like B-tree, and a highly extendable environment. It includes JSONB aggregators and extensive ACID-compliant transactions. MySQL is known for its speed, strong fundamentals, and focus on ease of use and lower hardware demands, making it a straightforward solution for many applications.

Room for Improvement: PostgreSQL could improve usability in input/output tools, enhance documentation, and streamline integrations for a better user experience. It also faces challenges with multi-master replication and event API efficiency. MySQL can improve performance with large transactions and scalability and needs better replication features and support for complex queries for enterprise robustness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: PostgreSQL offers flexible deployment across various environments, including on-premises and multiple cloud models. Its open-source nature provides robust community support but lacks a centralized support service. MySQL benefits from commercial backing, providing structured support for enterprise clients, while still supporting varied deployment options. Both platforms rely heavily on their respective communities for support and innovation.

Pricing and ROI: As a free, open-source database, PostgreSQL offers substantial cost advantages with costs mainly related to personnel and training, leading to high ROI due to saved licensing fees and lower operating costs. MySQL, despite being available as an open-source solution, can incur costs depending on the edition and support requirements. However, it offers competitive pricing for enterprise features, though PostgreSQL's open-source nature typically results in stronger cost-effectiveness for startups prioritizing customization.

To learn more, read our detailed MySQL vs. PostgreSQL Report (Updated: August 2026).

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MySQL vs. PostgreSQL

August 2026

Helped 908,800 peers since 2012

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

6.1

MySQL is valued for its cost-effectiveness, reliability, and ability to enhance productivity and efficiency, offering significant ROI.

Sentiment score

6.7

PostgreSQL offers cost savings and rapid ROI with free open-source capabilities, ideal for startups and growing enterprises.

I have seen a return on investment with MySQL, as it allows us to manage with fewer employees, focusing on business logic rather than database management.

AmitVerma4

Software Developer at Apptom

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No quotes available

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Customer Service

Sentiment score

6.8

MySQL users often rely on community resources, with mixed reviews on Oracle's pricey support, turning to internal teams or forums.

Sentiment score

6.7

PostgreSQL support is strong with community forums, detailed documentation, and high-rated resources, offering both free and paid options.

I would rate the documentation and online support a 10 out of 10.

reviewer2599590

Student at a university with 10,001+ employees

We have no issues and usually receive timely responses.

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Assistant Vice President at National Bank of Pakistan

If PostgreSQL is hosted on cloud services such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL, the support is handled by the cloud provider, who provides automated backups, monitoring, infrastructure management, and technical support tickets.

AyushVerma

Software Engineer at GSS Academy, Noida

Overall, we have a very small customer service team and a good engineering team with no overburden or bandwidth issues.

Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

For customizations and extensions, the community is very active and useful.

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Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

6.7

MySQL is user-friendly and scalable for small to medium applications, but larger enterprises may need clustering or commercial upgrades.

Sentiment score

7.4

PostgreSQL is highly scalable, handling large on-premise or cloud deployments effectively, supporting high transactions and growing user demands.

Meeting scalability requirements through cloud computing is an expensive affair.

Ravi Kant-Sharma

Technical Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

MySQL's scalability is currently adequate, as we have increased operations from ten thousand to twelve thousand devices, and it is working fine for us.

AmitVerma4

Software Developer at Apptom

For more quotes and insights, download the MySQL report

Now, we are doing the same level of transactions in PostgreSQL, around 100,000 transactions, and we are getting good throughput with no latency.

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Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.8

Users find MySQL stable and reliable, performing well across environments despite occasional challenges with larger tables.

Sentiment score

8.0

PostgreSQL is praised for its stability and reliability, outperforming MySQL, with issues mainly from misconfiguration, not intrinsic faults.

We face certain integration issues, especially when we integrate the database with security solutions like IBM QRadar.

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Assistant Vice President at National Bank of Pakistan

From my experience, MySQL was pretty stable.

reviewer2599590

Student at a university with 10,001+ employees

I have never seen any performance issue in PostgreSQL.

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Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

Room For Improvement

MySQL requires better scalability, improved cluster support, enhanced documentation, and more robust security, monitoring, and integration features.

PostgreSQL users seek improvements in interface, performance, scalability, integration, documentation, and support for large-scale real-time applications.

It could be more beneficial if MySQL can enhance its data masking functionality in the same way it has improved data encryption.

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Assistant Vice President at National Bank of Pakistan

Oracle could improve on scalability.

Ravi Kant-Sharma

Technical Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The load balancer, MySQL LB, which is used to connect to the application, lacks clear documentation.

Prabir Kumar Kundu

SR AVP–Presales Cloud & Platform Management Services at Path Infotech ltd

PostgreSQL remains a strong choice for enterprise applications due to its stability, extensibility, and SQL standards compliance.

Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing

Query optimization improves slow queries by using proper indexes, avoiding unnecessary joins, and using EXPLAIN ANALYZE to inspect query plans.

AyushVerma

Software Engineer at GSS Academy, Noida

If I need to increase the dimension to 3,000 or 5,000, that option should be available.

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Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find MySQL pricing flexible, with free and paid options, offering cost-effective solutions and scalability considerations.

PostgreSQL offers cost-effective scalability and flexibility with zero licensing fees, though setup and support may incur additional costs.

Oracle has different components, so if you need security, you have to procure a different license, but here everything is inbuilt and it's not costly.

Prabir Kumar Kundu

SR AVP–Presales Cloud & Platform Management Services at Path Infotech ltd

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Even with doing 100,000 transactions right now within PostgreSQL, we are happy with PostgreSQL and not seeing that it is expensive or going out of budget.

Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

The managed PostgreSQL itself is open source with no license fees.

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Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing

Valuable Features

MySQL is prized for ease, performance, cost-effectiveness, open-source support, platform compatibility, reliability, security, scalability, and documentation.

PostgreSQL excels in spatial support, high availability, JSONB handling, integration, scalability, and community-driven advanced features for diverse applications.

With Oracle, we have to buy another solution for encryption and masking, but MySQL supports native encryption, which enhances our return on investment.

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Assistant Vice President at National Bank of Pakistan

The main feature we utilize in MySQL is the view, and I can say that it is the most valuable feature for our needs.

AmitVerma4

Software Developer at Apptom

MySQL contributes to improved system reliability, faster application performance, and higher developer productivity.

Amandeep Pawar

Senior Engineer at Airy Software Technologies Private Limited

PostgreSQL improves reliability, performance, and scalability in production. Since it is ACID compliant, it ensures that database transactions are safe and consistent, preventing partial data updates, maintaining data integrity, and allowing multiple users to read or write data simultaneously using MVCC.

AyushVerma

Software Engineer at GSS Academy, Noida

The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL.

Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

Its robustness and reliability are incredible and stable, which is crucial for critical data, especially with AI model outputs.

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Software Engineer – Rust Systems & AI Evaluation at Turing

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)

PostgreSQL

Ranking in Open Source Databases

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

128

Ranking in other categories

Vector Databases (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of MySQL is 12.3%, up from 9.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 12.6%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
MySQL	12.3%
PostgreSQL	12.6%
Other	75.1%

Open Source Databases

Featured Reviews

Prabir Kumar Kundu

SR AVP–Presales Cloud & Platform Management Services at Path Infotech ltd

Offers robust security and availability with impressive replication capabilities

Regarding their documentation and interface, there is room for improvement. Documentation is definitely required when running multiple databases on a cluster system. The load balancer, MySQL LB, which is used to connect to the application, lacks clear documentation. When there are multiple application servers connecting to the MySQL cluster and going through the MySQL load balancer, the documentation is not user-friendly. It's there, but only technical persons with deep knowledge of the MySQL database can implement it. Most of the community users or ISVs who use MySQL don't have many technical persons or DBA experts, so they face some challenges for the high availability of connecting high available databases from high available applications. That documentation should be simplified.

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High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency

Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient

The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.

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See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	74
Midsize Enterprise	34
Large Enterprise	64

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	58
Midsize Enterprise	26
Large Enterprise	49

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...

How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?

PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?

I am not directly involved in the licensing or procurement decisions, so I cannot comment in detail on the price. From an engineering perspective, PostgreSQL is cost-efficient because it is open so...

What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?

While improving reliability, I have noticed that the limitations in PostgreSQL can be complex. For large-scale deployments, configuration, performance tuning, and related tasks can be complex and i...

Firebird SQL vs PostgreSQL

Comparisons

Firebird SQL vs MySQL

Compared 20% of the time

MariaDB vs MySQL

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Database vs MySQL

Compared 5% of the time

SQL Server vs MySQL

Compared 5% of the time

Teradata vs MySQL

Compared 4% of the time

More MySQL Competitors

Compared 12% of the time

MariaDB vs PostgreSQL

Compared 6% of the time

LanceDB vs PostgreSQL

Compared 5% of the time

Chroma vs PostgreSQL

Compared 5% of the time

InfluxDB vs PostgreSQL

Compared 5% of the time

Product Reports

Download MySQL product report

MySQL

July 2026

Download PostgreSQL product report

July 2026

Overview

MySQL is an open-source database known for its ease of use and high performance. It offers features like replication and clustering, making it ideal for diverse applications. Its cost-effectiveness and LAMP integration are key advantages for businesses.

MySQL supports a variety of languages and platforms, providing reliable, scalable data management. Its graphical interface and LAMP architecture integration enhance its usability, while community support further strengthens its appeal. Challenges include scalability issues with large databases, lack of advanced clustering, and limited high-availability features. Complex queries may affect performance, and integration can pose difficulties. The outdated interface and insufficient documentation are also concerns, along with replication and backup reliability issues.

What are MySQL's key features?

Open-source nature: Freely available and customizable.
Cross-platform compatibility: Supports multiple operating systems.
Scalability: Capable of handling large volumes of data.
Replication and clustering: Ensure data redundancy and load balancing.
Full-text search: Provides powerful search capabilities.
LAMP integration: Seamlessly integrates with Linux, Apache, and PHP.

What benefits should users consider?

Cost-effectiveness: Reduces expenses due to its open-source nature.
High performance: Efficiently processes large volumes of data.
Active community support: Access to a wide range of resources and expertise.
Versatile use cases: Suitable for varied applications including web development and IoT.

MySQL is widely implemented in industries such as web development, e-commerce, and finance. It's used for managing dynamic websites, powering e-commerce platforms, and supporting financial applications. Its compatibility with PHP and cost-effectiveness make it suitable for CMS platforms like WordPress. With cloud services integration, MySQL is a backend choice for scalable applications in various sectors.

Oracle

PostgreSQL is a versatile and reliable database management system commonly used for web development, data analysis, and building scalable databases.

It offers advanced features like indexing, replication, and transaction management. Users appreciate its flexibility, performance, and ability to handle large amounts of data efficiently. Its robustness, scalability, and support for complex queries make it highly valuable.

Additionally, PostgreSQL's extensibility, flexibility, community support, and frequent updates contribute to its ongoing improvement and stability.

Sample Customers

Facebook, Tumblr, Scholastic, MTV Networks, Wikipedia, Verizon Wireless, Sage Group, Glassfish Open Message Queue, and RightNow Technologies.

1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg