What are the best databases to use for Node.js applications?

Question

17

Options
Considered

487

User
Recs.

Sep 22, 2021

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 16 OptionsWhy?

Best databases to use for Node.js applications	Price	Platforms	Technology
95 PostgreSQL	-	Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD	C
76 RethinkDB	-	Windows, Linux, Mac	-
66 MongoDB	-	Windows,Mac,Linux	-
-- Redis	-	-	-
-- ArangoDB	-	Windows, Linux, Mac	C++

See Full List

15 Other Options Considered

RethinkDB

Top Pro

Easy install

Only takes about 30 seconds to install. They also have a docker file for running it on AWS, Google Cloud or your own. See More

Top Con

Cannot run queries from its CLI

InterestingClotho's Experience

too complicated to install and badly explained See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

JSON?:Yes

Top Pro

Changefeeds (change listeners)

You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes. See More

Top Con

No user accounts

This is just the database, you need to setup your own auth and user accounts (such as using Auth0). See More

Top Pro

Powerful query language

RethinkDB's ReQL is a very powerful functional query language. The functional aspects of ReQL and the straightforward implementation of the Node driver for Rethinkdb make it a natural fit for Javascript developers. You no longer have to type some obscure syntax in quotes (aka SQL), your queries are just "natural" Javascript functions in the same way you would use lodash to handle your collections. See More

Top Pro

Auto master promotion

Unlike a lot of other databases where if the master is down the system is down, this one if the master is down someone else is made master so much more peer to peer. See More

Top Pro

CLI and web administration tools

RethinkDB has administration tools in both CLI and GUI (web app). You can view whats going on right away by going to localhost:8080. The data explorer allows you to run queries on the db. See More

Top Pro

Horizontal scalability

RethinkDB is scalable horizontally. It has support for sharding, parallel queries and MVCC concurrency. See More

Top Pro

Ease of cluster setup

You can directly tell it to shard/replicate and how many shards/replicas depending on the amount of nodes. Each node doesn't need anything except one other node's ip/port in the cluster to join and maybe the auth. See More

See All

MongoDB

Top Pro

Perfect documentation and tutorials

Miles above other databases in educational resources. See More

Top Con

Reported to lose or corrupt data

MongoDB is famously known for leaking and losing data over time. See More

StudiousOcypete's Experience

nice See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows,Mac,Linux

JSON?:true

Top Pro

Great speed

MongoDB queries can be very fast because the data is usually all in one place and can easily be retrieved in a single lookup. But this is true only when the data is truly a document. When it's trying to emulate a relational model it starts to become really slow because it may have to perform many independent queries to retrieve a single document. See More

Top Con

Document Stores may be not suited for relational data

MongoDB has no JOIN, all relations are supposed to be resolved client-size which entails additional requests to the server. See More

Top Pro

Uses JSON

As Node.js uses JavaScript there's no need to map the returned JSON data from MongoDB, as JavaScript is a superset of JSON. Essentially solving object-relational impedance mismatch by its very nature. Working with JSON is also easier overall as it more easily fits into how you would represent data on the client. See More

Top Con

Need many search features

Though it is possible to index and search text in documents in MongoDB 4.0 in multiple languages. The indexing and search is not as powerful as for example Elastic Search. For instance not being able to search for only parts of words. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't require a unified data structure

Mongo is very flexible in that it doesn't require a unified data structure across all objects. So it's rather easy to use. See More

Top Pro

Easy to scale

MongoDB has powerful sharding and scaling capabilities for when the data stored in the database gets so large that a single machine may not be able to store all of it. Sharding solves this problem through horizontal scaling. Mongo gives developers the ability to easily and painlessly add or remove as many machines as needed. See More

See All

ArangoDB

Top Pro

Document and graph-orientend

You can model your data as documents or as a graph - no data model lock-in. You can even combine both models and use them in a single AQL query. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Technology:C++

Top Pro

Supports joins

Unlike many NoSQL databases, ArangoDB does support joins in AQL queries. See More

Top Pro

JavaScript-API

You can extend ArangoDB using JavaScript that runs directly on the Server (Google V8). You can build data-centric microservices that aggregate, validate, transform or enrich data (It's up to you, plain JavaScript) and provide those via a custom API route. See More

Top Pro

Transaction save

You can use ACID Transactions for short and small data retrieval and/or modification operations in ArangoDB. See More

Top Pro

Easy cluster setup

Top Pro

Powerful Java Driver (Sync & Async)

ArangoDB has a very good Java Driver for synchronous and asynchronous. In addition the team there is working on a Spring Data integration. See More

See All

SQLite

Top Pro

Flexible

Serverless, limitless and easy to implement and use. See More

Top Con

No multi-user

Lacks multi-user capabilities, see SQLite vs. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL: A Comparison of Relational Databases. Also see: Appropriate Uses For SQLite. See More

SensibleMerope's Experience

simple for small applications See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, IPhone

Technology:C

Top Pro

Portable

An SQLite database is a single ordinary disk file that can be located anywhere in the directory hierarchy. It works by sending requests to a single file where all the data is kept instead of communicating with a hosted database which gives access to an interface by making use of sockets and ports. The file format used is also cross-platform, so can easily be migrated to various machines. This makes SQLite extremely portable throughout different applications, all that's needed to transfer the whole database is to make a copy of the file. See More

Top Con

Some SQL features are missing

SQLite is made to be extremely lightweight and portable, but it still uses SQL. However, some SQL features such as RIGHT OUTER JOIN and FOR EACH STATEMENT are missing. See More

Top Pro

Zero configuration

There is literally no configuration required to get SQL lite up and running. This is mainly due to SQLite being serverless, there is no separate server process to install, setup, configure, initialize, manage, and troubleshoot. See More

Top Con

Limited locking

Locking is done at file/database level -- effectively only one process or thread can update at a time. This puts a severe limit on the scalabilty of this database for server applications. See More

Top Pro

Reliable

With less complication, there is less to go wrong. See More

Top Pro

Great for testing and first stages of development

Because of it's ability to scale and with the portability that a single-file database gives you without losing much of the power and features that SQL gives developers, it's a great choice for testing applications and for the early stages of development when the workload and the data that needs to be stored is not that large. See More

Top Pro

Small

SQLite is also only 350KiB in size. See More

Top Pro

Self-contained

SQLite is largely self-contained. It requires very minimal support from external libraries or from the operating system. See More

Top Pro

Not unnecessarily fiddly

Top Pro

Great language support

SQLite has bindings for a large number of programming languages, including BASIC, Delphi, C, C#, C++, Clipper//Harbour, Common Lisp, Curl, D, Free Pascal, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Livecode, Lua, newLisp, Objective-C (on OS X and iOS), OCaml, Perl, PHP, Pike, PureBasic, Python, R, REALbasic, REBOL, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, Tcl, Visual Basic. See More

See All

CouchDB

Top Con

Can only achieve consistency through replication and verification

Since CouchDB is considered an AP (Available, Partition-Tolerant database management system), it is not really consistent (not all clients can have the same view of the data consistently) and the only way to achieve some "eventual consistency" is through replication and verification of data. See More

Top Pro

Simple Map/Reduce support

The M/R system lets you process terabytes of documents in parallel, save the results, and only need to reprocess documents that have changed on subsequent updates. While not as powerful as Hadoop, it is an easy to use query system that's hard to screw up. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, BSD

Top Pro

Replicate and sync with the browser via PouchDB

You can keep a synced copy of your database on the client-side with PouchDB. This allows for much faster data access than HTTP would allow, and offline usage. See More

Top Pro

Useful for applications where versioning is important

CouchDB is mostly used in applications where a large amount of data needs to be accumulated and where data only changes rarely. See More

Top Pro

Sharding and Clustering support

As of CouchDB 2.0, it supports clustering and sharding of documents between instances without needing a load balancer to determine where requests should go. See More

Top Pro

Master-Master replication

You can clone, continuously backup, and listen for changes through the replication protocol, even over unreliable WAN links. See More

Top Pro

Works well between physical network partitions

CouchDB works very well even when the network is physically partitioned See More

Top Pro

Available

CouchDB is considered an available DMS according to the ACP theory of database management. As such it allows every client to always read and write See More

See All

MySQL

Top Pro

Lots of community support available

As MySQL is used by a lot of people, there's a good number of libraries, tutorials and examples available that should help you through all kinds of situations. See More

Top Con

Error messages usually are not very detailed

When you are trying to do something in MySQL and something goes wrong it will simply give you an error message with an error code. WHich does not say much about what went wrong unless you look it up online. This can be a little cumbersome during development. See More

Specs

Technology:C/C++

Top Pro

Scalable

MySQL is made to handle a lot of data and to be used in large applications. This makes it extremely scalable and fast, even under a lot of workload. See More

Top Pro

Multiple third-party tools that help working with MySQL

Since MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases, maybe the most popular, there exist many third-party tools and applications that help developers to use MySQL in their development. See More

Top Pro

Backed by Oracle

Top Pro

Easy to start working with

Because of it's popularity there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there that help developers install and work with MySQL. The installation process itself is not very hard and there are multiple powerful GUI tools that make it extremely easy to work with MySQL for a beginner. See More

See All

OrientDB

Top Pro

Free clustering support

Unlike other NoSql databases, OrientDB offers clustering support for free. Furthermore, it's not a basic Master/Slave, but it supports Master-Master replication + Sharding. See More

Top Con

Bulk inserts may cause an out of memory crash

When doing inserts in OrientDB you have to be careful to do them one at a time. Bulk inserts may cause out of memory error. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Technology:Java

Top Pro

Open Source commercial friendly license (Apache 2)

The Apache 2 license is one of the most liberal licenses. You can use OrientDB for any purpose for free. See More

Top Con

Learning curve

A lot of effort went into making OrientDB easy and familiar to use (such as SQL queries for example). However, it's important to understand the database engine a bit and how it works in general (links for example). This involves a bit of a learning curve if you're not familiar with graph databases. Not an enormous curve or anything, but it's still a consideration. See More

Top Pro

Multi-model database (document, object, graph)

This database is primarily, or historically, thought of as a graph database. However, it is actually a multi-model database that supports a variety of noSQL models (key-value, document, etc.). See More

Top Con

Not well known

It's a very unfortunate thing, but it's true. Not many people know of this gem so that makes it difficult to find community support at times. It also makes it hard to get people on board with it who shop products by brand name or flashy marketing. It also means there are fewer code snippets, libraries, and frameworks that consider it. While it's interoperability is good with SQL support and Tinkerpop, it still doesn't change the fact that many things don't give it much thought and that can lead to more work as a developer sometimes. See More

Top Pro

Enterprise version available

The Community Edition is free and covers many features, but an Enterprise Edition is available (prices are transparent, published online) with 24x7 support. See More

Top Pro

Performance

OrientDB is very fast, especially when it comes to relationships between records (or "links"). See More

Top Pro

Full text search

Full text search support is available when using Lucene based indexing algorithm. See More

Top Pro

Multi-master replication

OrientDB is incredibly scalable thanks to its multi-master replication. All nodes in a cluster can both read and write. See More

Top Pro

Supports sql as well as other query languages

It can be queried in a number of ways, but the ability to query with SQL makes it a bit more familiar to use. See More

Top Pro

Distributed Graph Database with relational type Documents

See All

Neo4j

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Technology:Java

Orchestrate

Top Pro

Effortless/Automatic Scaling

Orchestrate was built for scale. Orchestrate is a full-fledged distributed data system, provided as a multi-tenant service. There is no need to manage finite server resources like disk space, CPU, or memory See More

Top Con

Data are not on your server

Since it's a DBaaS, your data are completely on their server. It cannot be run on your server. Backup is handled by them as well, which may be good or not depending on your needs. See More

Top Pro

Already set up for you

Orchestrate is a Database-as-a-Service, so there is no downloading, installation, or any other administration. It also makes configuration management and deployment easy. See More

Top Con

Not Open Source

Orchestrate is not an open source solution. See More

Top Pro

Great Node.js support

Orchestrate.js is a first class client for Node.js applications See More

Top Pro

Fault Tolerance Baked In

As a DBaaS, Orchestrate manages replicas and sharding across multiple machines. Additionally, daily backups are managed by the company. See More

Top Pro

Multiple Query types at Low Latencies

No other database provides Full-Text-Search, Time-Series, Graph, and Key/Value APIs. Moreover, as a DBaaS, the queries are pre-optimized for low latencies. Consistently under 10ms for any query. See More

See All

Apache Cassandra

Top Pro

Highly available cluster

Once setup database is set up, it becomes highly available without any downtime. See More

CromulentIlmarinen's Experience

More Than just good See More

Top Pro

Highly scalable

Cassandra is very scalable and achieves the highest throughput for the maximum number of nodes compared to other alternatives. Unfortunately this also brings rather high write and read latencies. See More

Top Pro

Rapid writing and lightning-fast reading

After measuring the read/write performance values on one server, you can simply calculate how many more servers you should add to the cluster to reach the required performance levels, and scale easily. See More

Top Pro

Familiar to developers used to SQL

The query language that Cassandra uses (CQL) is similar to SQL even though it's a NoSQL database. See More

See All

Oracle Database

Top Con

Proprietary

mira-db

Aerospike

See flagged products

I Recommend...

Built By the Slant team

Find the best product instantly.

Lustre recommends the best products at their lowest prices – right on Amazon.

4.7 star rating

Try it now - it's free

score 124 · Accepted Answer

PostgreSQL

Top Pro

Fully ACID compliant

PostgreSQL is known to have a very holistic approach to robustness and data integrity which is reflected by it being fully ACID compliant. PostgreSQL has always been strict about making sure data is valid before allowing it into the database, and there is no way for a client to bypass those checks. Depending on your requirements, ACID compliance might be important. See More

Top Con

Not suited for small apps

Because of it's complexity and power, it may be an overkill to use PostgreSQL in small applications that will not make use of it's full power. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD

Technology:C

JSON?:Yes

Top Pro

High performance

PostgreSQL performance increases with each release, this is also proven by many benchmark tests. Notable performance features include: As PostgreSQL only supports one storage engine, it has been able to integrate and optimise it and with the rest of the database. This has resulted in multiple benefits such as the ability to allow different transaction types to co-exist efficiently without the need to select storage engine types once for each table ahead of time. On the fly data compression resulting in less IO required for reading. Asynchronous + synchronous Replication. PostgreSQL supports a asynchronous API for use by client applications. It is reported to increase performance by up to 40% and is not supported by MySQL. Designed to scale very well with large numbers of cores at high concurrency levels. See More

Top Pro

Strong community

PostgreSQL has a strong community backing it, with guides, tutorials and support for any kind of problem a developer may have. See More

Top Pro

Support for JSON data type

JSON data can be stored as a column with optional indexes. In 9.4 (upcoming at the time of this writing), JSONB will be a binary version of JSON that will save space. It's like the best of the NO-SQL world without having to give up ACID and Relationships. This means that cascading deletes can be done in a single Transaction across multiple JSON documents. See More

Top Pro

Actively developed

Regular fixes and features are released See More

Top Pro

Support for geographic objects

PostgreSQL can be extended to have geographic object support through PostGIS and allows for location queries to be run through SQL. See More

Top Pro

Multiple node packages available

There are many packages (like Sequelize) that integrate deeply with the features Postgres offers. See More

Top Pro

Support Perl and Python for coding stored procedures

Postgres supports popular languages for coding stored procedures, such as Perl and Python. So, you can fairly easy transform just DB-server to reliable Service with complex business logic. See More

Top Pro

Open Source, powerful and on par with other paid RDBMS'

It is a powerful, open source product that has all the bells and whistles when compared with its costly, proprietary counterparts. See More

See All

Built by Slant

Find the best product
instantly.

Stop wasting time searching endlessly. Lustre recommends the best products at their lowest prices – right on Amazon.

4.7 star rating

Add to Chrome - It's Free

Add to Edge - It's Free

Add to Firefox - It's Free

Add to Opera - It's Free

Add to Brave - It's Free

Add to Safari - It's Free

Try now - it's free

The Best 1 of 16 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for PostgreSQL

My Recommendation for PostgreSQL

Fully ACID compliant

Not suited for small apps

High performance

Strong community

Support for JSON data type

Actively developed

Support for geographic objects

Multiple node packages available

Support Perl and Python for coding stored procedures

Open Source, powerful and on par with other paid RDBMS'

15 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for RethinkDB

My Recommendation for RethinkDB

Easy install

Cannot run queries from its CLI

Changefeeds (change listeners)

No user accounts

Powerful query language

Auto master promotion

CLI and web administration tools

Horizontal scalability

Ease of cluster setup

My Recommendation for MongoDB

My Recommendation for MongoDB

Perfect documentation and tutorials

Reported to lose or corrupt data

Great speed

Document Stores may be not suited for relational data

Uses JSON

Need many search features

Doesn't require a unified data structure

Easy to scale

My Recommendation for Redis

My Recommendation for Redis

In-Memory

Redis is written in ANSI C and therefore doesn't have a VM

My Recommendation for ArangoDB

My Recommendation for ArangoDB

Document and graph-orientend

Supports joins

JavaScript-API

Transaction save

Easy cluster setup

Powerful Java Driver (Sync & Async)

My Recommendation for SQLite

My Recommendation for SQLite

Flexible

No multi-user

Portable

Some SQL features are missing

Zero configuration

Limited locking

Reliable

Great for testing and first stages of development

Small

Self-contained

Not unnecessarily fiddly

Great language support

My Recommendation for CouchDB

My Recommendation for CouchDB

Can only achieve consistency through replication and verification

Simple Map/Reduce support

Replicate and sync with the browser via PouchDB

Useful for applications where versioning is important

Sharding and Clustering support

Master-Master replication

Works well between physical network partitions

Available

My Recommendation for RxDB

My Recommendation for RxDB

Replication with couchdb

Build size is over average

You can subscribe to queries

My Recommendation for MySQL

My Recommendation for MySQL

Lots of community support available

Error messages usually are not very detailed