Self-Hosted MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL Alternatives

Why people look for a MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL alternative

This entry is a different shape from the others: MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL are all open source, self-hostable, and are themselves among the options on this site. They appear as a comparison page because the thing people are actually moving away from is usually not the engine but the managed service around it — RDS, Aurora or a cloud database where pricing is set per instance-hour and per gigabyte, and where scaling past a size you did not anticipate means a plan change and a bill you did not model. The engine was never the expensive part.

Which one should you pick?

The honest framing is that this is not a licence question at all — it is an operations question. What you gain by self-hosting is control of the bill and of the data; what you take on is backups that you have tested, replication you understand, and upgrades you schedule yourself. MariaDB is the drop-in choice if you are migrating an existing MySQL workload — it is a fork of MySQL under a licence steward that is a foundation rather than a single company. PostgreSQL is the stronger default for a new project: stricter SQL compliance, a richer type system, and a track record of behaviour that does not surprise you. A small database on your own hardware is one of the few things that genuinely runs well on modest hardware, but only if you leave a tested restore path behind you.

Before you migrate

Self-hosting means you are the one who gets paged when something breaks at 11pm. Before committing, be honest about three things:

• Where will it run? A €4/month VPS handles most of these comfortably. A NAS or spare mini PC is even cheaper if you already own one.
• Who backs it up? A self-hosted service with no backup is worse than a cloud service, because at least the cloud service had someone else's redundancy. Set up automated backups before you migrate real data into it.
• How will you reach it remotely? Most people start with a WireGuard or Tailscale tunnel rather than exposing ports directly. That is the right instinct.

Migrating your data

Nearly every MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL competitor listed above ships an import path — CSV, JSON, or a documented export format. The practical move is to migrate one project or one folder first, run both systems side by side for a week, and only then cut over. Export formats are rarely as clean as the marketing suggests, and it is much easier to notice a broken import on a test set than on five years of records.