PostgreSQL

Overview

PostgreSQL began in 1986 as the POSTGRES project at the University of California, Berkeley, and is developed by a global community under the PostgreSQL Licence, a liberal open-source licence similar to BSD or MIT^[5][6]. The current major release is PostgreSQL 18, with point release 18.7 published on 12 November 2026 alongside updates to versions 14 to 17, and PostgreSQL 19 at release-candidate stage^[5].

Its feature set is broad: JSON and JSONB, arrays, ranges, UUIDs and custom types; B-tree, GiST, GIN and BRIN indexes; multiversion concurrency control, partitioning, parallel query and JIT compilation; all SQL-standard isolation levels including Serializable; write-ahead logging with asynchronous, synchronous and logical replication and point-in-time recovery; and authentication via LDAP, SCRAM-SHA-256, certificates or OAuth 2.0 with row- and column-level security^[5]. Extensions such as PostGIS and foreign data wrappers allow it to act as a platform rather than a single product^[5]. Most cloud providers and many start-ups, including Supabase, Neon and Amazon Aurora, build services on PostgreSQL compatibility^[22][23][11]. The main limitation is that operations, such as high availability and connection pooling, require third-party tools or a managed service.

What PostgreSQL does

• JSON/JSONB and rich data types
• GIN, GiST, BRIN and B-tree indexes
• Logical and synchronous replication
• Row- and column-level security
• Extensions including PostGIS
• Parallel query and JIT

PostgreSQL pricing

Free and open source under the PostgreSQL Licence.

PostgreSQL strengths and limitations

Appears in

• Best Database Software in 2026 #3

PostgreSQL alternatives and competitors

Alternatives to PostgreSQL: companies ranked in the same lists.

• OOracle
• Microsoft Power BI
• MMySQL
• MongoDB
• Amazon Lex
• Redis
• IBM Consulting
• MariaDB
• SQLite
• CockroachDB
• Supabase
• Neon