Is Formance or MariaDB better?

Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and MariaDB at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.

Which is cheaper, Formance or MariaDB?

Formance starts at Free and MariaDB at Free.

Does Formance or MariaDB run on more platforms?

Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. MariaDB runs on Linux, Unix, Windows, macOS.

Can I use Formance for free?

Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.

What is Formance best used for?

Formance is most often used for a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable, a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit, a payments team that wants one normalised model across several psps so reconciliation is not written separately for each, a company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappears. Of those, a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable and a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit are not what MariaDB is typically brought in for.

What can Formance do that MariaDB cannot?

Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. MariaDB covers MySQL Compatibility, Aria Storage Engine, ColumnStore, Galera Cluster.

APIs · head to head

Formance vs MariaDB

Formance

APIs

Open source double-entry ledger and payment orchestration for money-moving software

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

MariaDB

Databases

The open source relational database for the enterprise

From: Free
Rated: -

Full review Website

The short version

Each has a real cost: Formance formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.; MariaDB jSON support using text fields rather than native binary type; lacks MySQL's JSON syntax and functions
They diverge on capability: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, MariaDB covers MySQL Compatibility.
Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Formance and MariaDB actually diverge.

Attributes where Formance and MariaDB differ
Attribute	Formance	MariaDB
Pricing model	Open source, no licence fee	Unknown
Platforms	Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API	Linux, Unix, Windows, macOS
Category	APIs	Databases
Founded	Unknown	2009

Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Formance

Double-entry ledger
Numscript transaction DSL
Multi-currency
Payments connectivity
Reconciliation
Self-hosted deployment
Cloud offering
API and SDKs

Only in MariaDB

MySQL Compatibility
Aria Storage Engine
ColumnStore
Galera Cluster
MaxScale
Spider Engine
Temporal Tables
phpMyAdmin

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Formance

A marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditablenot MariaDB
A fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an auditnot MariaDB
A payments team that wants one normalised model across several PSPs so reconciliation is not written separately for eachnot MariaDB
A company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappearsnot MariaDB

MariaDB

Transaction processingnot Formance
Data storagenot Formance
Application backendnot Formance
Reportingnot Formance
Data analyticsnot Formance

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Formance

Formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.
Numscript is a domain-specific language your team must learn, and while it makes complex splits expressible it also means transaction logic sits outside the languages your engineers already debug well.
Self-hosting a ledger that must never lose or duplicate a transaction is a serious operational commitment covering backups, upgrades and Postgres tuning, which is real cost the zero licence fee hides.
Enterprise pricing is not published, so the difference between the free path and the supported path cannot be evaluated without a sales conversation.
The company is much smaller than the incumbent alternatives, and while the MIT licence protects the code it does not protect the roadmap, so features on the hosted side may arrive slowly or change direction.

MariaDB

JSON support using text fields rather than native binary type; lacks MySQL's JSON syntax and functions
Galera Cluster maximum performance limited to the slowest node in cluster
InnoDB tables limited to 1,017 columns and 64 secondary indexes
Transaction size limits in Galera (128K rows and 2GB by default)
Less strict SQL type checking than PostgreSQL; allows implicit conversions

Pricing, plan by plan

Formance

Free

Open SourceFree
- MIT licensed core ledger
- Numscript transaction DSL
- Multi-currency tracking
Enterprise$undefined/year
- Managed or private deployment
- Payments connectivity and reconciliation
- Support with response commitments

MariaDB

Free

No published plan breakdown. See the MariaDB review.

Which should you pick?

Choose Formance if

You need double-entry ledger.
You want to start without paying.
You work on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API.
You also want numscript transaction dsl.

Formance review

Choose MariaDB if

You need mysql compatibility.
You want to start without paying.
You work on Linux, Unix, Windows, macOS.
You also want aria storage engine.

MariaDB review

Questions people ask

Is Formance or MariaDB better?: Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and MariaDB at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Formance or MariaDB?: Formance starts at Free and MariaDB at Free.
Does Formance or MariaDB run on more platforms?: Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. MariaDB runs on Linux, Unix, Windows, macOS.
Can I use Formance for free?: Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
What is Formance best used for?: Formance is most often used for a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable, a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit, a payments team that wants one normalised model across several psps so reconciliation is not written separately for each, a company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappears. Of those, a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable and a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit are not what MariaDB is typically brought in for.
What can Formance do that MariaDB cannot?: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. MariaDB covers MySQL Compatibility, Aria Storage Engine, ColumnStore, Galera Cluster.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Formance: Is Formance really open source?

Yes. The core ledger is MIT licensed with full source access and no deployment restrictions.

MariaDB: Is MariaDB completely free and open source?

Yes. MariaDB Server is licensed under GPLv2 and guaranteed to remain perpetually free and open source, independent of any commercial entities.

Source

Formance: Does Formance move money?

No. It records and orchestrates movements; the actual payments happen at a PSP or bank you connect.

MariaDB: Is MariaDB backward compatible with MySQL?

Yes. MariaDB was designed as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. Every application, driver, and configuration that worked with MySQL works with MariaDB without code changes.

Source

Formance: What does the enterprise version cost?

Not published. It is an annual subscription quoted per customer.

MariaDB: What are the storage engine options in MariaDB?

MariaDB supports multiple storage engines including InnoDB (transactional, default), Aria (crash-safe, good for read-heavy workloads), and MyISAM. The Aria engine is faster than InnoDB for certain read-heavy queries and full table scans.

Source

Formance: Do I have to use Numscript?

Yes for anything beyond the simplest transfers. It is how multi-party transactions are expressed atomically.

MariaDB: How much does MariaDB cost?

MariaDB Community Server is completely free to download and use. MariaDB offers paid enterprise support and managed cloud services for organizations needing professional support.

Source

MariaDB: Does MariaDB support native JSON storage?

MariaDB stores JSON using text fields (the JSON type is an alias for LONGTEXT), not as a native binary type like MySQL does. JSON support exists but is less sophisticated than MySQL's JSON functions and syntax.

Source

MariaDB: What scaling options does MariaDB provide?

MariaDB supports both scaling up (more cores, memory, storage) and scaling out (read replication, Galera Cluster with multi-node replication). However, Galera Cluster performance cannot exceed the slowest node in the cluster.

Source

Formance vs MariaDB

Formance

MariaDB

The short version

Where they differ

What each one covers

Only in Formance

Only in MariaDB

What people use each for

Formance

MariaDB

Where each one falls short

Formance

MariaDB

Pricing, plan by plan

Formance

MariaDB

Which should you pick?

Choose Formance if

Choose MariaDB if

Questions people ask

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Related pages

More on Formance

More on MariaDB

Keep looking

Other head to heads