ClickHouse alternatives

Supabase

Backend platform

Best forPostgres plus auth, storage and realtime in one project.

Trade-offAuth, storage and database in one vendor makes leaving harder later, and free projects pause after a week without activity.

Used by 564 makers' products for this

Firebase

Backend platform

Best forMobile apps that need offline sync and client-side SDKs.

Trade-offA document store without SQL joins; hard to migrate off.

Used by 182 makers' products for this

MongoDB

Managed database

Best forDocument-shaped data and teams already fluent in Mongo.

Trade-offNo joins or schema by default, so relational data and migrations take discipline you'd get for free in Postgres.

Used by 131 makers' products for this

Neon

Managed database

Best forServerless Postgres that scales to zero, with a branch per preview deploy.

Trade-offCold starts after idle periods add latency to the first query, and heavy always-on workloads can cost more than a fixed server.

Used by 95 makers' products for this

PostgreSQL

Run it yourself

Best forThe engine behind most of the hosted options above, run on your own server or container for full control and a flat cost.

Trade-offBackups, upgrades, failover and connection pooling are yours to set up and watch.

Used by 74 makers' products for this

Convex

Backend platform

Best forRealtime, collaborative apps written entirely in TypeScript.

Trade-offIts own data model and query API rather than SQL.

Used by 50 makers' products for this

PlanetScale

Managed database

Best forApps that expect heavy scale and want zero-downtime schema changes.

Trade-offNo free tier.

Used by 29 makers' products for this

Turso

Managed database

Best forSQLite at the edge, or one database per customer.

Trade-offSQLite semantics — one writer at a time, fewer extensions — suit read-heavy apps better than write-heavy ones.

Used by 13 makers' products for this

Tinybird

Analytics (OLAP)

Best forManaged ClickHouse that turns SQL over event streams into fast API endpoints for dashboards and usage analytics in your product.

Trade-offClosed, cloud-only service; its own project format and CLI to learn on top of ClickHouse SQL.

Used by 30 makers' products for this · ClickHouse vs Tinybird →

Neo4j

Graph

Best forData that is mostly relationships — social graphs, recommendations, knowledge graphs — queried with Cypher.

Trade-offA second database and query language to learn and run; managed AuraDB is priced by memory.

Used by 19 makers' products for this

DuckDB

Analytics (OLAP)

Best forAnalytical SQL inside your app or script over local or S3-hosted CSV and Parquet files, with no server to run.

Trade-offAn embedded library, so it doesn't serve many concurrent writers like a database server does.

Used by 14 makers' products for this · ClickHouse vs DuckDB →

Appwrite

Backend platform

Best forA Firebase-style backend — database, auth, storage, functions and messaging — that is open source and can be self-hosted.

Trade-offIts own document-style database API rather than plain SQL; self-hosting runs many containers.

Used by 8 makers' products for this

Best forA backend — database, API endpoints, business logic and auth — built visually instead of in code.

Trade-offClosed platform with logic stored in its own visual format; the free plan is rate-limited and meant for testing, so production starts at a paid annual plan.

Used by 8 makers' products for this

PocketBase

Backend platform

Best forA whole backend — database, auth, files, realtime and admin UI — in one self-hosted executable.

Trade-offSQLite on a single server, so it scales up, not out; still pre-1.0, so upgrades can include breaking changes.

Used by 6 makers' products for this

MySQL

Run it yourself

Best forPHP, Laravel, WordPress and Rails stacks, and teams that already know MySQL well.

Trade-offFewer extensions and advanced types than Postgres, so most new tooling (vectors, JSON-heavy work) targets Postgres first.

Used by 6 makers' products for this

Best forRealtime, multiplayer and offline-friendly apps where the frontend queries and writes data directly, with auth, permissions and storage included.

Trade-offInstant Cloud closed to new signups in August 2026 and shuts down in August 2027, so new projects mean self-hosting it.

Used by 2 makers' products for this

Best forPostgres branches that copy instantly and scale to zero, for a separate database per developer, pull request or agent, optionally filled with anonymized production data.

Trade-offNo ongoing free tier on its cloud, only a trial; the older Xata with built-in search and its own SDK was retired in 2026, so older tutorials don't apply.

Used by 1 makers' products for this

SQLite

Run it yourself

Best forA database that is just a file in your app — desktop and mobile apps, single-server web apps, tests and prototypes.

Trade-offOne writer at a time and no network access of its own; backups and replication need extra tools (Litestream, or a host like Turso).

No maker product tracked for this yet

Cloudflare D1

Managed database

Best forA serverless SQLite database for apps running on Cloudflare Workers or Pages, with a free tier and no egress fees.

Trade-offEach database is capped at 10 GB, writes go through a single primary, and it's reached from Workers rather than from any server.

No maker product tracked for this yet

Amazon DynamoDB

Managed database

Best forA serverless key-value and document database on AWS that scales with no servers to manage, with an always-free tier.

Trade-offNo joins or ad-hoc queries; you design tables around your queries in advance, and changing them later is costly.

No maker product tracked for this yet

MariaDB

Run it yourself

Best forA MySQL-compatible open-source database, the default MySQL on many Linux distributions and hosts.

Trade-offHas drifted from MySQL over the years, so some newer MySQL features and tools don't carry over exactly.

No maker product tracked for this yet