MySQL vs PostgreSQL
MySQL and PostgreSQL are both evaluated in the CIOPages Enterprise Database Platforms Buyer's Guide. The guide groups MySQL under Open-Source and PostgreSQL under Open-Source Default.
| Attribute | MySQL (+ Aurora MySQL, HeatWave) | PostgreSQL (+ managed: RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure DB) |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Open-Source | Open-Source Default |
| Best for | Read-heavy web workloads and teams with deep existing MySQL investment and skills | Almost any new transactional application — the default you should have to argue your way out of |
From the Enterprise Database Platforms Buyer's Guide, updated June 2026. 10 vendors evaluated.
MySQL (+ Aurora MySQL, HeatWave)
Ubiquitous for read-heavy web applications, with a vast talent pool and deep operational familiarity: open-source under the GPL, available managed everywhere, with Oracle’s HeatWave adding an in-database analytics and ML accelerator that closes the OLTP and OLAP gap, Aurora MySQL as a popular cloud-optimized variant, and forks like MariaDB and Percona keeping the ecosystem competitive. Stewardship sits with Oracle, which makes some communities wary and is part of why new projects increasingly start on Postgres instead. It has historically been thinner on advanced SQL, extensibility, and complex-query and concurrency handling than Postgres, and the most differentiated capabilities are tied to Oracle’s cloud.
PostgreSQL (+ managed: RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure DB)
Start here and make someone argue you off it: the category’s center of gravity and the most-used database among professional developers in the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, under a permissive license with no source-available drama, an unmatched extension ecosystem — PostGIS for geospatial, pgvector for AI embeddings, TimescaleDB for time-series — strong SQL standard coverage, and a first-party managed flavor on every cloud, with migrations from other engines overwhelmingly heading toward it. Vanilla Postgres scales writes on a single primary, so horizontal write scale means sharding with Citus or moving to a distributed-SQL engine. Self-managed Postgres demands real expertise in vacuum, bloat, connection limits, and major-version upgrades, first-party enterprise support comes from third parties like EDB, Crunchy, and Percona, and managed-service feature sets and version cadence vary by cloud.
PostgreSQL (+ managed: RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure DB) in the full guide
Also evaluated in this guide
Amazon Aurora & DynamoDB, CockroachDB, Couchbase (Capella), Google AlloyDB & Cloud Spanner, Microsoft SQL Server / Azure SQL, MongoDB (Atlas), Oracle Database, Redis / Valkey
Related comparisons
- MongoDB vs PostgreSQL
- PostgreSQL vs Redis
- Microsoft SQL Server vs MySQL
- MongoDB vs MySQL
- MySQL vs Oracle Database
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