PostgreSQL

Open source
Self-hosted
22.1k

Verified Sep 2026

The world's most advanced open source relational database

The open-source relational engine the industry standardized on: SQL, JSONB, full-text and pgvector in one database.

PostgreSQL is the open-source relational database that became the default answer for new products: full SQL, transactions, strong consistency, JSON documents, full-text search, extensions like PostGIS and pgvector, and a managed version offered by every cloud provider. It is the database the industry standardized on.

Why founders use it: it removes the need to choose a database per feature. Rows for billing, JSONB for flexible payloads, full-text for search, pgvector for embeddings, materialized views for analytics, one engine, one backup story, one set of skills. Managed variants, Neon for branching, Supabase for a backend around it, make it cheaper than ever to run well.

A realistic setup: schema with migrations from day one, connection pooling for serverless, indexes written from real query plans, and logical replication when a read replica is needed. Row-level security scopes multi-tenant data cleanly.

Trade-offs: it is a single-writer engine, so vertical scaling and read replicas precede sharding, and tuning under high write load is specialist work. Compare with MySQL for simpler operational lore and with the NewSQL options when global write scale is the actual requirement.