DB2 offers industry leading performance, scale, and reliability on your choice of platform from Linux to z/OS. DB2 supports storing XML and relational data and offers SQL PL and PL/SQL procedural languages.
Microsoft SQL Server Alternatives
Microsoft SQL Server is described as 'SQL Server delivers on Microsoft’s Data Platform vision by helping your organization manage your data by enabling you to store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents within the database' and is a popular relational database in the development category. There are more than 50 alternatives to Microsoft SQL Server for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Web-based and Self-Hosted apps. The best Microsoft SQL Server alternative is SQLite, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Microsoft SQL Server are PostgreSQL, MySQL Community Edition, MariaDB and MongoDB.
Alternatives list
A complete cloud-first data platform that includes a multi-model transactional data management engine, an application development platform, and interoperability engine, and an open analytics platform.
Cost / License
- Paid
- Proprietary
Application type
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
A full-stack, syncing database that runs on both server and client. Pluggable storage (indexeddb, sqlite, durable objects), syncs over websockets, and works with your favorite framework (React, Solid, Vue, Svelte).
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source (AGPL-3.0)
Platforms
- Self-Hosted
- Software as a Service (SaaS)

Vertica is a grid-based, column-oriented database designed to manage large, fast-growing volumes of data and provide very fast query performance when used for data warehouses and other query-intensive applications.
Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application type
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Android
- Android Tablet
SAP HANA is a completely re-imagined platform for real-time business.
It transforms business by streamlining transactions, analytics, planning, predictive, sentiment data processing on a single in-memory database so business can operate in real-time.
Cockroach is a distributed key/value datastore which supports ACID transactional semantics and versioned values as first-class features. The primary design goal is global consistency and survivability, hence the name.

Cost / License
- Freemium
- Proprietary
Platforms
- Software as a Service (SaaS)


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VistaDB is an embedded database engine for Visual Studio .Net developers (C# / VB.NET) with TSQL Procs, CLR procs, XCopy deployment, and much more.
Cost / License
- Paid
- Proprietary
Platforms
- Windows


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Datomic is a database of flexible, time-based facts, supporting queries and joins, with elastic scalability, and ACID transactions.
Cost / License
- Freemium
- Proprietary
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
Azure Cosmos DB is a NoSQL document database service designed from the ground up to natively support JSON and JavaScript directly inside the database engine. It’s the right solution for web and mobile applications when predictable throughput, low latency, and flexible query are...
Cost / License
- Paid
- Proprietary
Platforms
- Online

TimesTen is a memory-optimized, relational database management system with persistence and recoverability. Originally designed and implemented at Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo Alto, California, TimesTen was spun out into a separate startup in 1996 and acquired by Oracle...
Cost / License
- Paid
- Proprietary
Application types
Platforms
- Windows
- Linux




































