Databases
MariaDB has 5 supported release lines and MySQL has 2. MariaDB 13.0 reaches end of life on Dec 31, 2026, and MySQL 8.0 reached end of life on Apr 30, 2026. Both are open source under the GPL-2.0 licence.
Last checked against endoflife.date and deps.dev.
Every value links to its source. Where a row doesn’t apply to one of them, the cell says why.
| Compared on |  MariaDB |  MySQL |
|---|---|---|
| Support and releases | ||
| Supported release lines | 5 lines: 13.0, 12.3 LTS, 11.8 LTS, 11.4 LTS, 10.11 LTS Next to end: 13.0 on Dec 31, 2026 | |
| Latest release | ||
| Releases in the last 12 months | ||
| Security | ||
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev | Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | ||
| Licence and hosting | ||
| Licence | GPL-2.0 Open source (copyleft) That’s MySQL Community Server; Oracle also sells MySQL Enterprise Edition under a commercial licence. | |
| How you run it | Self-hosted, or managed on Amazon RDS for MariaDB | Self-hosted, or managed by most clouds (Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure) |
| Adoption | ||
| GitHub stars | ||
| MariaDB | MySQL |
|---|---|
| Supported release lines | |
5 lines: 13.0, 12.3 LTS, 11.8 LTS, 11.4 LTS, 10.11 LTS Next to end: 13.0 on Dec 31, 2026 | |
| Latest release | |
| Releases in the last 12 months | |
| MariaDB | MySQL |
|---|---|
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | |
Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev | Not tracked as a package on OSV.dev |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | |
| MariaDB | MySQL |
|---|---|
| Licence | |
GPL-2.0 Open source (copyleft) That’s MySQL Community Server; Oracle also sells MySQL Enterprise Edition under a commercial licence. | |
| How you run it | |
Self-hosted, or managed on Amazon RDS for MariaDB | Self-hosted, or managed by most clouds (Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure) |
| MariaDB | MySQL |
|---|---|
| GitHub stars | |
Read across for what matters to you. Each answer comes from the data above or the project’s licence and hosting options.
| If you need | MariaDB | MySQL |
|---|---|---|
| An open-source licence | Yes: GPL-2.0 | Yes: GPL-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | Yes: From Amazon RDS | Yes: From Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure |
| You can run it on your own servers | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | 12.3 LTS is supported until Jun 12, 2029 | 9.7 LTS is supported until Apr 30, 2034 |
| MariaDB | MySQL |
|---|---|
| An open-source licence | |
Yes: GPL-2.0 | Yes: GPL-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | |
Yes: From Amazon RDS | Yes: From Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure |
| You can run it on your own servers | |
Yes: Yes, it’s software you install | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | |
12.3 LTS is supported until Jun 12, 2029 | 9.7 LTS is supported until Apr 30, 2034 |
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From StackPrism’s curated notes. Pricing isn’t covered here: it changes often, so check each vendor’s pricing page.
MariaDB began in 2009 as a fork of MySQL led by MySQL’s original developer and still speaks the same client protocol, so most drivers and tools work with both. The two have diverged in features and release schedules since, which is why the support windows below matter as much as compatibility.
Release lines and end-of-life dates come from endoflife.date, release counts from deps.dev’s publish dates, and advisories from OSV.dev, counted once per flaw even when it’s listed under several ids, and checked against CISA’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited. Status and incident history come from each vendor’s public status feed; licences from each project’s licence file or the vendor’s licensing page, linked in the table.
The data refreshes every few hours and the time it was checked is shown above. There’s no pricing and no overall winner: which one fits depends on your constraints. To see how the versions you actually run hold up, check your repo.
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