Top Microsoft SQL Server Alternatives and Competitors
Looking to upgrade or change your solution? Take away the guesswork and stay informed with end user feedback to identify and select the solution that best matches your needs.
Apply intelligence across all your data with SQL Server 2022. Whether your data is structured or unstructured, query and analyze it using the data platform with industry-leading performance and security. Regardless of where your data is stored, query and analyze it with the data platform known for performance, security, and availability.
Common Features
Analytics and Reporting | Data Virtualization | Big Data Analytics | Data Management | Operations Management | Data Protection and Security | Data Monitoring and Administration | Data Backup | Data Replication | Database Management | Systems Performance Management | Cloud/On-Prem/Hybrid Deployment | Distributed Processing | High Availability | High Speed & Online Transaction Processing | Hybrid Transaction and Analytical Support
8.9
Composite
Score
+92
Emotional
Footprint
167
Reviews
Best Alternatives and Competitors to Microsoft SQL Server
Compare how Microsoft SQL Server stacks up to the competition in the areas that matter most to real users to short list options that will best fit your business needs.
Oracle
Oracle Database
8.9
Composite
Score
+92
Emotional
Footprint
104
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database is:
Better at Support
Easier to Customize
Easier to Use
Less Transparent
Less Efficient
Harder to Implement
Oracle’s Database management capabilities make DBA lives easier by providing a full-lifecycle solution encompassing change and configuration management, patching, provisioning, testing, masking/subsetting, performance management and automatic tuning.
Cloudera
Cloudera Operational Database
8.8
Composite
Score
+99
Emotional
Footprint
35
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Cloudera Operational Database is:
Better at Support
More Inspiring
More Caring
More Innovative
More Respectful
More Efficient
Build applications with a wide-column NoSQL database. Fuel development with fast data access, SQL compatibility, and integrated search for insight discovery. Power real-time, critical applications with a high-performance NoSQL solution. A wide-column NoSQL database with fast data access, SQL compatibility, and integrated search, built for the demands of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Progress Software
Progress Data Platform
8.4
Composite
Score
+90
Emotional
Footprint
50
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Progress Data Platform is:
Harder to Use
Worse at Training
Harder to Implement
Worse at Integrating
Less Inspiring
Less Reliable
Accelerate data agility with an end-to-end solution that connects, curates and consumes data. Artificial intelligence (AI) and enterprise initiatives thrive off data that is managed, trusted and secure. Do more with your data with the Progress Data Platform.
Amazon
Amazon Aurora
8.0
Composite
Score
+94
Emotional
Footprint
48
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon Aurora is:
More Innovative
Better at Support
More Transparent
More Respectful
More Efficient
Harder to Use
Amazon Aurora is a relational database engine that combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides unparalleled high-performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. Amazon Aurora provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services.
Redis Labs
Redis Enterprise
7.9
Composite
Score
+91
Emotional
Footprint
20
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Redis Enterprise is:
More Caring
More Innovative
Easier to Implement
Less Reliable
Less Transparent
Harder to Use
Redis Enterprise is a robust in-memory NoSQL database built by the devs who built open source Redis. It maintains the simplicity and high performance of Redis, while adding many enterprise-grade capabilities. Redis Enterprise Software enables you to install an enterprise-grade cluster that acts as a container for managing and running multiple Redis databases in a highly available and scalable manner, with predictable and stable top performance.
IBM
IBM Db2
7.9
Composite
Score
+91
Emotional
Footprint
27
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2 is:
More Inspiring
More Respectful
Harder to Implement
Worse at Training
Less Transparent
Less Efficient
Transform and modernize your business with the leader in AI-driven data management solutions. IBM Db2 is a family of hybrid data management products offering a complete suite of AI-empowered capabilities designed to help you manage both structured and unstructured data on premises as well as in private and public cloud environments. Db2 is built on an intelligent common SQL engine designed for scalability and flexibility.
SAP
SAP HANA Cloud
7.7
Composite
Score
+90
Emotional
Footprint
45
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, SAP HANA Cloud is:
Less Transparent
Worse at Training
Harder to Implement
Harder to Customize
Less Efficient
Harder to Use
SAP HANA Cloud is the trusted database that powers SAP’s mission-critical solutions, such as SAP Business Data Cloud, with multi-model engines and enterprise-grade performance and reliability. Harness the power of your data and accelerate trusted outcome-driven innovation by developing intelligent and live solutions for real-time decisions and actions on a single data copy. Support next-generation transactional and analytical processing with a broad set of advanced analytics – run securely across hybrid and multicloud environments.
Neo4J
Neo4j Graph Database
7.6
Composite
Score
+90
Emotional
Footprint
18
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Neo4j Graph Database is:
Easier to Use
Less Inspiring
Worse at Support
Less Reliable
Less Transparent
Less Respectful
Centered around the leading graph database, today's Neo4j Graph Data Platform is a suite of applications and tools helping the world make sense of data. The Platform includes Neo4j Graph Data Science – the leading enterprise-ready analytics workspace for graph data – the graph visualization and exploration tool Bloom, the Cypher query language, and numerous tools, integrations and connectors to help developers and data scientists build graph-based solutions with ease.
Percona
Percona MySQL
7.6
Composite
Score
+94
Emotional
Footprint
16
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Percona MySQL is:
Easier to Customize
More Innovative
Less Inspiring
Harder to Use
Less Transparent
Harder to Implement
Percona is committed to producing open source software for Percona Server, MySQL®, MariaDB®, and MySQL DBaaS users. Percona solutions are also commonly adopted by OpenStack users who require high performance and high availability for optimal cloud operations. Percona software for MySQL includes an open source MySQL alternative and Percona-built open source management, backup, and observability tools.
Microsoft Corporation
Azure Cosmos DB
7.6
Composite
Score
+89
Emotional
Footprint
22
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Cosmos DB is:
More Inspiring
Better at Support
Less Respectful
Less Transparent
Less Efficient
Less Reliable
Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service for modern app development with guaranteed single-digit millisecond response times and 99.999-per cent availability, backed by SLAs, automatic and instant scalability, and open-source APIs for MongoDB and Cassandra. Azure Cosmos DB offers a solution for modern apps and intelligent workloads by being very responsive with dynamic and elastic autoscale. It is available in every Azure region and can automatically replicate data closer to users.
Teradata
Teradata VantageCloud
7.5
Composite
Score
+88
Emotional
Footprint
32
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata VantageCloud is:
Less Inspiring
Less Respectful
Worse at Training
Less Innovative
Less Caring
Harder to Use
Teradata Vantage is the cloud data analytics platform that unifies everything - data lakes, data warehouses, analytics, and new data sources and types. Leading the way with hybrid multi-cloud environments and priced for flexibility, Vantage delivers unlimited intelligence to build the future of your business. Vantage's enterprise-grade, multidimensional scalability lets you scale dimensions simultaneously to handle the massive data workloads of the future, today.
IBM
IBM Informix
7.3
Composite
Score
+70
Emotional
Footprint
26
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Informix is:
Less Innovative
Less Inspiring
Less Reliable
Less Caring
Less Transparent
Worse at Training
IBM Informix is a high performance, always-on, highly scalable and easily embeddable enterprise-class database optimized for the most demanding transactional and analytics workloads. As an object-relational engine, IBM Informix seamlessly integrates the best of relational and object-oriented capabilities enabling the flexible modeling of complex data structures and relationships.
Couchbase
Couchbase Server
7.1
Composite
Score
+74
Emotional
Footprint
22
Reviews
Reviews Say
Compared to Microsoft SQL Server, Couchbase Server is:
Less Transparent
Less Efficient
Less Innovative
Harder to Implement
Less Reliable
Less Inspiring
Couchbase is a distributed, transactional, multipurpose database for AI-powered applications. It does the work of multiple purpose-built databases, including vector and time-series. It caches data for speed, supports SQL for JSON, and scales linearly. It replicates and synchronizes to mobile apps, and helps simplify data architectures without sacrificing application features.
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