Ranking > Open Source vs. Commercial
Popularity of open source DBMS versus commercial DBMS
Based on the measurements we are using for our ranking of database management systems, we analyze the popularity of open source tools compared to the popularity of commercial systems.
A system is classified as open source, when the source code is freely available and may be used and modified according to respective licenses.
Number of systems, January 2026
| DB-Engines lists 428 different database management systems. This pie chart shows the number of open source and commercial systems. |
Popularity scores, January 2026
| This pie chart compares the popularity of open source and commercial systems. It is calculated by summing up the popularity (i.e. the ranking scores) of all individual systems. |
Popularity trend
The above chart shows the historical trend of the popularity of open source and commercial database management systems.
Popularity broken down by database model, January 2026
This chart demonstrates that the popularity of open source tools heavily depends on their database model.
The top 5 commercial systems, January 2026
| Rank | System | Score | Overall Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Oracle | 1237 | 1. |
| 2. | Microsoft SQL Server | 706 | 3. |
| 3. | Snowflake | 208 | 6. |
| 4. | Databricks | 142 | 8. |
| 5. | IBM Db2 | 113 | 9. |
The top 5 open source systems, January 2026
| Rank | System | Score | Overall Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | MySQL | 868 | 2. |
| 2. | PostgreSQL | 666 | 4. |
| 3. | MongoDB | 377 | 5. |
| 4. | Redis | 144 | 7. |
| 5. | Elasticsearch | 107 | 10. |
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