Postgres vs MySQL: Which Database Should You Choose in 2026?

The short answer

Default to Postgres. Choose MySQL when: your hosting only offers MySQL, your team has deep MySQL operational expertise, or you're reading billions of simple rows and have benchmarked a real advantage. Postgres is the better general-purpose database in 2026.

Side-by-side

Feature	Postgres	MySQL
Standards compliance (SQL)	Excellent	Good (some quirks)
Built-in types	Arrays, JSONB, UUID, ranges, network types, money, XML	JSON (less powerful than JSONB), standard types
JSON/document storage	JSONB — indexed, queryable, full-text searchable	Adequate JSON, fewer operators
Full-text search	Built-in, respectable	Built-in, basic
Geospatial	PostGIS (gold standard)	Basic spatial extensions
Extensions	Huge ecosystem (TimescaleDB, pgvector, Citus, pg_cron)	Limited
Replication	Streaming, logical, cascading	Binlog replication, group replication
Simple read throughput	Good	Often faster on trivial queries
Write throughput	Excellent	Excellent
DDL while live	Mostly non-blocking	Improved in 8.0 but still locky
License	PostgreSQL License (permissive)	GPL (dual-licensed) — Oracle-owned

Where Postgres pulls ahead

• JSONB — not just "stores JSON" but indexes it, queries it with rich operators, and integrates with full-text search. The single feature that lets Postgres replace MongoDB for many document workloads.
• CTEs and window functions — both databases support them now, but Postgres's implementation is more complete and optimizes better.
• Concurrent writes + MVCC — Postgres handles mixed read/write workloads with less locking than MySQL's default InnoDB config.
• Extensions — pgvector (AI/embedding workloads), TimescaleDB (time-series), PostGIS (geospatial), Citus (sharding), pg_partman (automatic partitioning). Nothing comparable in MySQL.
• Transactional DDL — you can wrap schema changes in a transaction and roll them back if something goes wrong. MySQL largely cannot.

Where MySQL is still reasonable

• Managed hosting availability — every low-cost shared host runs MySQL; Postgres support is more niche (improving rapidly)
• WordPress and PHP ecosystem — vast legacy of MySQL-first apps; switching costs are real
• Simple, massive read workloads — MySQL's InnoDB with tuned indexes can edge out Postgres for million-row point lookups. Benchmark with your actual workload.
• MariaDB fork — truly open source, Oracle-independent; if that matters, MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL

The managed-cloud decision

AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure, DigitalOcean, Supabase, and Neon all offer Postgres. Every major cloud also offers MySQL. Managed pricing is similar. Supabase and Neon are Postgres-specific and offer features (branching, serverless) that MySQL equivalents don't match yet.

The "we use both" pattern

Large shops sometimes keep MySQL for legacy apps and adopt Postgres for greenfield work. There's no rule against it. New projects in 2026: default to Postgres.

Tools for both

Format queries in either dialect with SQL formatter. For JSON/JSONB inspection: JSON formatter. Generating good primary keys (UUIDv7 works well as a clustered key in both): UUID generator. Hashing passwords before storage: hash generator (remember: use bcrypt/argon2 via library, not raw SHA-256).