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IBM Informix vs MariaDB comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Informix
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
26th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Embedded Database (10th)
MariaDB
Ranking in Relational Databases Tools
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Relational Databases Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Informix is 1.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MariaDB is 3.3%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Relational Databases Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
MariaDB3.3%
IBM Informix1.8%
Other94.9%
Relational Databases Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Nasir Niamat - PeerSpot reviewer
DB Consultant at i2c
Has offered a cost-effective option despite frequent technical issues and limited market demand
We find some bugs in IBM Informix. Maybe we are using it more aggressively than others. Every month or every second month, we find some bugs in it, which is not ideal. It should be rare, not this frequent. The good thing is they cover those bugs in the next release within weeks or days on demand. IBM Informix should become hybrid and should include AI features similar to other DBMS systems such as Snowflake, Redshift, and DataBricks. This would help its value rise with the market.
AB
Co-Founder at Vsigma IT Labs Pvt Ltd
Has supported web application data needs but requires design adjustments to manage complex queries efficiently
Complex queries in MariaDB where the query needs to parse thousands of lines or data values face some performance issues. For small and medium-size volume, it is pretty good. If it goes beyond certain data and complex queries, we see performance issues. We tried the advanced replication feature between different regions, replicating data specifically residing on MariaDB to two different regions of MariaDB data, and there were some technical snags in terms of slowness and longer processing time. Point-in-time recovery in MariaDB is good for small databases. When data volume increases beyond 5 GB or 10 GB per day or runs into double-digit GBs, we found some performance issues. For data below 10 GB, it works fine. Performance is the primary focus area for MariaDB, particularly during transactions or complex query jobs where slow performance is observed. MariaDB is scalable and easy to scale.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"This solution has made financial reporting possible by allowing financial people the opportunity to set Informix to "Auto Pilot" so that they can attend other duties."
"It supports in-house-built applications in .NET and VB6"
"Overall, this is a great product. It works really well, is very stable, and is very scalable."
"Every version is faster than the previous."
"It is very easy to install IBM Informix, very easy to scale, and support is quite better."
"Informix can support huge quantities of data with less memory and less capacity."
"Replication is a valuable feature and easy to use."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"I like the global transaction IDs (GTIDs) feature. It's quite reliable for replication between a master and a replica server, and it's a feature that MySQL also has but implemented differently."
"It delivers fast processing times, particularly for frequent select queries and insert/update operations."
"The technical support of MariaDB is very helpful, and they came and tuned our queries with one-to-one assistance."
"We use MariaDB for identity provider services. Most of the things that we are doing are deployed in the container mode. All such solutions require a database, and MariaDB is easier to use for these kinds of deployments."
"This solution is user-friendly."
"The stability of MariaDB is good, it has high availability."
"The product has been stable and reliable."
"They provide a high level of technical support."
 

Cons

"For me, it's always too expensive. The problem is that Informix sometimes competes with free products, so yes, it's very expensive, but when we're talking about licensed products like SQL Server or anything, the midsize pricing could be significantly improved."
"The solution doesn't include functionality like data anonymization."
"I would like to see backups from secondary servers."
"Continue extending the SQL language for compatibility with the competition's language, including Stored Procedure Language."
"The pricing is a bit expensive."
"This solution is in need of more current tools."
"I experienced poor input/output (IO) performance."
"The product needs a lot more marketing involvement from IBM."
"Replication could be better, and it's not so simple. It would be better if they had a replication server. It would make things a lot easier. You need to have that replication server, but not in the same server farm. Then there will be a bit of latency between both because you should have one in one city and another one in a different city. That kind of solution should be more baked into every single database today. Mirroring the database in a live environment where any record written on the production server replicates instantly across the fiber on the other server wasn't easy. Many people don't even bother with that, and they just run one server."
"The difficult part related to the product stems not from the tool itself but is related to learning how to implement the product in the right way without creating any wrong configuration that could cause security issues or performance issues."
"The solution should do some fine-tuning on maybe the transaction per second so that users can get more than they can on the Microsoft SQL Server."
"An improvement would be scaling it up to the levels of Oracle, especially when it comes to resilience, so that we can do higher transactions for two databases or power our operation."
"Document caching is an area of concern in the product, where improvements are required to help MariaDB improve on the previous queries as they are retained, and you can roll back to them."
"I’m not sure if it can scale, so I’m not sure how it would fare for significant companies."
"It would be good if they can maybe improve the mass import in the database. Currently, for importing a large number of data, we create a CSV file and upload all the things in the system. The system does not activate them by default. We have to do this manually. This may be due to the version we are using, but this is something we would like to see improved."
"It doesn't have the same level of maturity metrics as Postgres."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For me, it's always too expensive."
"The free edition can be enough to handle moderate-size implementations, but you may want a pay for edition to benefit from more functionality, such as replication."
"I am not aware of the licensing costs or terms."
"The product has reasonable pricing. We purchase its yearly license."
"It's an open-source solution."
"The licensing cost is approximately $4000.00 per year and the licensing is based on the software and the number of posts that you make."
"This is an open source solution with no licensing fees."
"It is free of charge."
"My company uses the free version of the solution."
"MariaDB is open-source and self-hosted."
"The product is not expensive."
"This is an open-source product, which can be used free of charge."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business28
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Informix?
There is a cost reason to move from IBM Informix. It is relatively cheaper than Oracle. The second reason is that moving the whole application to a new database would require significant cost. The ...
What needs improvement with IBM Informix?
We find some bugs in IBM Informix. Maybe we are using it more aggressively than others. Every month or every second month, we find some bugs in it, which is not ideal. It should be rare, not this f...
What is your primary use case for IBM Informix?
We are using IBM Informix for OLTP systems. We are using IBM Informix although it is a technology that is not very popular compared to others. We are using it because our application was initially ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MariaDB?
MariaDB is in the pricey range, especially for huge databases handling terabytes of data. The cost depends on the volume of data and different features enabled during configuration, such as backup ...
What needs improvement with MariaDB?
The key area where MariaDB could be improved is its native GUI tooling; while the command-line interface works perfectly fine, the built-in visual tools for administration, management, and query de...
What is your primary use case for MariaDB?
My main use case for MariaDB was web applications, and I have been using MariaDB for just about a year now as I was in the development team. A specific web application where I used MariaDB is a hea...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Informix
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Shaspa, Hildebrand, Kaifa, Ranhill Powertron, Federaci‹ Farmacutica (FedeFarma), Camden Council, The German Aerospace Center (DLR), Myers, Votorantim Group, Doosan Infracore, GreenIvory
Google, Wikipedia, Tencent, Verizon, DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank, Telefónica, Huatai Securities
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Informix vs. MariaDB and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.