Best Free Embedded Database Systems of 2026

Compare the Top Free Embedded Database Systems as of February 2026

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What are Free Embedded Database Systems?

Embedded database systems are lightweight, self-contained databases that are integrated directly into applications, allowing data management without requiring a separate database server. They are optimized for performance and simplicity, often running within the same process as the host application, making them ideal for use in mobile apps, IoT devices, and small-scale applications. These databases support SQL or other query languages and offer full database functionality, including transaction management and data integrity. Embedded database systems are designed to operate with minimal configuration, providing fast, reliable data storage and retrieval within constrained environments. Their ease of integration and low resource usage make them essential for applications that need efficient local data management without the overhead of external databases. Compare and read user reviews of the best Free Embedded Database systems currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

1

Ditto

Ditto

Ditto is an embedded database designed for mobile and edge devices that goes far beyond local storage. Unlike traditional embedded databases that operate in isolation, Ditto comes with built-in peer-to-peer sync and edge-aware connectivity, enabling devices to synchronize data without relying on a central server or constant internet access. At the core of Ditto is a CRDT-based (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type) engine that guarantees strong eventual consistency across distributed nodes—even in fully offline, partitioned, or mobile-first environments. This allows developers to build highly resilient and collaborative applications where data is always local, yet automatically synchronized across devices when connections become available. Ditto abstracts the complexity of connectivity with dynamic, channel-agnostic discovery. Devices running Ditto form ad-hoc mesh networks using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, LAN, cellular, or any combination syncing data changes in real-time.

2 Ratings

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2

MySQL

Oracle

MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. With its proven performance, reliability, and ease-of-use, MySQL has become the leading database choice for web-based applications, used by high profile web properties including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all five of the top five websites*. Additionally, it is an extremely popular choice as embedded database, distributed by thousands of ISVs and OEMs.

6 Ratings

Starting Price: Free

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3

Chroma

Chroma

Chroma is an AI-native open-source embedding database. Chroma has all the tools you need to use embeddings. Chroma is building the database that learns. Pick up an issue, create a PR, or participate in our Discord and let the community know what features you would like.

Starting Price: Free

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4

LanceDB

LanceDB

LanceDB is a developer-friendly, open source database for AI. From hyperscalable vector search and advanced retrieval for RAG to streaming training data and interactive exploration of large-scale AI datasets, LanceDB is the best foundation for your AI application. Installs in seconds and fits seamlessly into your existing data and AI toolchain. An embedded database (think SQLite or DuckDB) with native object storage integration, LanceDB can be deployed anywhere and easily scales to zero when not in use. From rapid prototyping to hyper-scale production, LanceDB delivers blazing-fast performance for search, analytics, and training for multimodal AI data. Leading AI companies have indexed billions of vectors and petabytes of text, images, and videos, at a fraction of the cost of other vector databases. More than just embedding. Filter, select, and stream training data directly from object storage to keep GPU utilization high.

Starting Price: $16.03 per month

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5

Firebird

Firebird Foundation

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. It has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981. The Firebird Project is a commercially independent project of C and C++ programmers, technical advisors and supporters developing and enhancing a multi-platform relational database management system based on the source code released by Inprise Corp (now known as Borland Software Corp) on 25 July, 2000. The Firebird Project supplies users, developers, and administrators with various kinds of documentation, from Quick Start guides to expert-level articles devoted to various aspects of Firebird.

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6

InterSystems Caché

InterSystems

InterSystems Caché® is a high-performance database that powers transaction processing applications around the world. It is used for everything from mapping a billion stars in the Milky Way, to processing a billion equity trades in a day, to managing smart energy grids. Caché is a multi-model (object, relational, key-value) DBMS and application server developed by InterSystems. InterSystems Caché provides several APIs to operate with same data simultaneously: key-value, relational, object, document, multi-dimensional. Data can be managed via SQL, Java, node.js, .NET, C++, Python. Caché also provides an application server which hosts web apps (CSP), REST, SOAP, web sockets and other types of TCP access for Caché data.

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7

Oracle Berkeley DB

Oracle

Berkeley DB is a family of embedded key-value database libraries providing scalable high-performance data management services to applications. The Berkeley DB products use simple function-call APIs for data access and management. Berkeley DB enables the development of custom data management solutions, without the overhead traditionally associated with such custom projects. Berkeley DB provides a collection of well-proven building-block technologies that can be configured to address any application need from the hand-held device to the data center, from a local storage solution to a world-wide distributed one, from kilobytes to petabytes.

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8

IBM Informix

IBM

IBM Informix® is a fast and flexible database with the ability to seamlessly integrate SQL, NoSQL/JSON, and time series and spatial data. Its versatility and ease of use make Informix a preferred solution for a wide range of environments, from enterprise data warehouses to individual application development. Also, with its small footprint and self-managing capabilities, Informix is well suited for embedded data-management solutions. IoT data demands robust processing and integration capabilities. Informix offers a hybrid database system with minimal administrative requirements and memory footprint combined with powerful functionality. Key features make Informix ideal for multi-tiered architectures that require processing at the device level, at gateway layers and in the cloud. Native encryption to protect data at rest and in motion. Support for flexible schema, multiple APIs and configurations.

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9

Embeddinghub

Featureform

Operationalize your embeddings with one simple tool. Experience a comprehensive database designed to provide embedding functionality that, until now, required multiple platforms. Elevate your machine learning quickly and painlessly through Embeddinghub. Embeddings are dense, numerical representations of real-world objects and relationships, expressed as vectors. They are often created by first defining a supervised machine learning problem, known as a "surrogate problem." Embeddings intend to capture the semantics of the inputs they were derived from, subsequently getting shared and reused for improved learning across machine learning models. Embeddinghub lets you achieve this in a streamlined, intuitive way.

Starting Price: Free

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10

SAP HANA

SAP

SAP HANA in-memory database is for transactional and analytical workloads with any data type — on a single data copy. It breaks down the transactional and analytical silos in organizations, for quick decision-making, on premise and in the cloud. Innovate without boundaries on a database management system, where you can develop intelligent and live solutions for quick decision-making on a single data copy. And with advanced analytics, you can support next-generation transactional processing. Build data solutions with cloud-native scalability, speed, and performance. With the SAP HANA Cloud database, you can gain trusted, business-ready information from a single solution, while enabling security, privacy, and anonymization with proven enterprise reliability. An intelligent enterprise runs on insight from data – and more than ever, this insight must be delivered in real time.

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11

Couchbase

Couchbase

Unlike other NoSQL databases, Couchbase provides an enterprise-class, multicloud to edge database that offers the robust capabilities required for business-critical applications on a highly scalable and available platform. As a distributed cloud-native database, Couchbase runs in modern dynamic environments and on any cloud, either customer-managed or fully managed as-a-service. Couchbase is built on open standards, combining the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL, to simplify the transition from mainframe and relational databases. Couchbase Server is a multipurpose, distributed database that fuses the strengths of relational databases such as SQL and ACID transactions with JSON’s versatility, with a foundation that is extremely fast and scalable. It’s used across industries for things like user profiles, dynamic product catalogs, GenAI apps, vector search, high-speed caching, and much more.

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12

Neo4j

Neo4j

Neo4j’s graph data platform is purpose-built to leverage not only data but also data relationships. Using Neo4j, developers build intelligent applications that traverse today's large, interconnected datasets in real time. Powered by a native graph storage and processing engine, Neo4j’s graph database delivers an intuitive, flexible and secure database for unique, actionable insights.

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13

InterBase

Embarcadero

Ultrafast, scalable, embeddable SQL database with commercial-grade data security, disaster recovery, and change synchronization. Cross-platform, zero-install, embedded database as a direct-access library. Cross-platform, zero-install, embedded database with database-level and column-level AES and DES encryption. Concurrent applications/client access to the database on Windows with database-level and column-level AES and DES encryption. Ultrafast, scalable, SQL server database for Windows and Linux with commercial-grade data security, disaster recovery and change synchronization. Attacks on databases and loss of data can be costly and lead to loss of customers’ trust (and business), regulatory action, and heavy fines. InterBase provides over-the-wire and at-rest encryption, separate security login, and role-based user security. InterBase maintains full on-disk encryption while adding negligible overhead to database speed and performance.

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