Databases in 2026
9 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Snowflake has the most readers, about 6.5k a month. 82 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. Prometheus leads with 67k stars, ahead of Etcd. 73 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: Apache-2.0 (51), MIT (16) and AGPL-3.0 (7).
Narrower
- Time-series databases 30 InfluxDB Cloud, Timescale Cloud and Prometheus
- Vector databases 31 Pinecone, Milvus and Qdrant
Commercial databases
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1
Snowflake Snowflake Inc.
Snowflake powers AI, data engineering, applications, and analytics on a trusted, scalable AI Data Cloud—eliminating silos and accelerating innovation.
Complete system Production-ready A company has many data sources to combine for analytics and wants a managed warehouse that scales without tuning.
6.5k readers a month Since 2012 Commercial -
2
MongoDB Atlas MongoDB, Inc.
Build AI applications and agents on MongoDB Atlas platform, the #1 modern, run anywhere platform that brings together real-time data, intelligent retrieval, and governed action.
Building block Production-ready Your app suits a JSON document model and you want MongoDB without running it yourself.
4.1k readers a month Since 2009 Commercial -
3
Oracle Database Oracle Corporation
Proprietary database management system
Building block Production-ready A large enterprise runs software that requires Oracle, or needs its high-end availability features.
2.2k readers a month Since 1979 Commercial -
4
Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft
SQL Server 2025 redefines what's possible for enterprise data. With developer-first features and integration with analytics and AI models, SQL Server 2025 accelerates AI innovation using the data you already have.
Building block Production-ready Your business runs .NET applications or vendor software that requires SQL Server.
945 readers a month Commercial -
5
Google BigQuery Google
BigQuery is the autonomous data and AI platform, automating the entire data life cycle so you can go from data to AI to action faster.
Complete system Production-ready You are on Google Cloud or export GA4 data and want SQL analytics without managing servers.
313 readers a month Since 2010 Commercial -
6
InfluxDB Cloud InfluxData
InfluxDB 3 is the leading time series database to collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-resolution data in real-time.
Building block Production-ready You collect high-volume IoT or monitoring metrics and want a purpose-built time-series store you do not run yourself.
298 readers a month Since 2013 Commercial -
7
Amazon Aurora Amazon Web Services
Amazon Aurora is a global-scale relational database service built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.
Building block Production-ready You run on AWS and need a MySQL or Postgres database with higher availability than standard RDS.
89 readers a month Commercial -
8
Timescale Cloud Tiger Data
From the creators of TimescaleDB — the PostgreSQL platform trusted by enterprises processing trillions of metrics daily. Start a free trial or get a demo.
Building block Production-ready You want time-series performance while keeping full PostgreSQL and SQL for the rest of your data.
Commercial -
9
Pinecone Pinecone Systems
Pinecone is the trusted AI knowledge company. Its AI knowledge platform—Database, Nexus, and Marketplace—powers accurate, fast, cost-effective AI for 10,000+ customers and 1M developers worldwide.
Building block Production-ready You need vector search at scale in production and do not want to run the infrastructure.
Commercial
Open-source databases
Complete systems you can adopt 1
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1
Prometheus prometheus
The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.
Complete system Production-ready You run services or Kubernetes and need metrics and alerting with the de facto standard toolset.
★ 67k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
Building blocks for your own system 9
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1
Etcd etcd-io
Distributed reliable key-value store for the most critical data of a distributed system
Building block Production-ready You need a small amount of critical coordination data kept consistent across a cluster.
★ 52k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today -
2
ClickHouse ClickHouse
ClickHouse® is a real-time analytics database management system
Building block Production-ready You need fast analytics on large append-heavy data such as events, logs or metrics.
★ 51k Apache-2.0 C++ Active, pushed today -
3
Milvus milvus-io
Milvus is a high-performance, cloud-native vector database built for scalable vector ANN search
Building block Production-ready You need vector search over hundreds of millions of embeddings or more and have the people to run a distributed system.
★ 47k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today -
4
DuckDB duckdb
DuckDB is a high-performance analytical database system
Building block Production-ready You analyse data that fits on one machine and want fast SQL without running a server.
★ 43k MIT C++ Active, pushed today -
5
TiDB pingcap
TiDB is built for agentic workloads that grow unpredictably, with ACID guarantees and native support for transactions, analytics, and vector search. No data silos. No noisy neighbors. No infrastructure ceiling.
Building block Production-ready You run MySQL workloads that have outgrown one server and need to scale out without manual sharding.
★ 41k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today -
6
Qdrant qdrant
Qdrant - High-performance, massive-scale Vector Database and Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI. Also available in the cloud https://cloud.qdrant.io/
Building block Production-ready You are building semantic search, RAG or recommendations and want a dedicated vector store that is simple to self-host.
★ 35k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
7
Cognee topoteretes
Cognee is the open-source AI memory platform for agents. Give your AI agents persistent long-term memory with small models for free
Building block Usable You build agents that need long-term memory across sessions and want graph-based retrieval rather than plain vector RAG.
★ 33k Apache-2.0 Python Active, pushed today -
8
InfluxDB influxdata
Scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics
Building block Production-ready You collect large volumes of time-stamped data such as IoT or monitoring metrics.
★ 32k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today -
9
Chroma chroma-core
Search infrastructure for AI
Building block Production-ready You are building retrieval for an LLM app and want something simple to start with locally.
★ 30k Apache-2.0 Rust Active, pushed 3 days ago
Compared head to head
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Open-source licenses
- Permissive: 71. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Network copyleft: 7. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Strong copyleft: 3. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
- Weak copyleft: 1. Changes to the licensed files must be shared, but you can link them into a closed program.
Languages
Java 15, Go 14, Rust 13, C++ 9, Python 9, TypeScript 9, C 5, C# 2, Jupyter Notebook 2, Shell 1, PHP 1, Jinja 1 and Dart 1.
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