The following databases were selected not only for their availablity to the general public but also because of their broad appeal and scope, and access to full-text resources.

The AWS Free Tier let's users explore more than 100 products to start building on AWS, including offers that are always free, 12 months free, and shorter-term free trials. Product Benefits AWS provides the broadest selection of purpose-built databases. A Lack of Free Options for Online Databases. As you've been reading, you've probably noticed the lack of outright free options. That's not an oversight on our part-there simply aren't any 100 percent free online databases apps that are worth recommending.

• African Journals Online
  A service to provide access to African published research, and increase worldwide knowledge of indigenous scholarship. It's published in Africa and cover the full range of academic disciplines.
  
• AGRICOLA
  This catalog of the U.S. National Agriculatural Library (NAL) provides citations to agricultural literature. The NAL houses one of the world's largest and most accessible agricultural information collections and advances access to global information for agriculture.
  
• AIDSinfo
  Access to wide-ranging Federal resources on HIV/AIDS clinical research, HIV treatment and prevention, and medical practice guidelines for health care providers and consumers.
  
• Bartleby.com Reference Works
  The Bartleby.com site, originally created at Columbia University, includes a host of e-texts, all browsable and searchable, including such reference works as:
  • American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed., 2000) [UCSB call #: PE 1628 .A623 2000]
  • Anatomy of the Human Body by Henry Gray (20th ed., 1918) [UCSB has later editions at: QM 23.2 .G73]
  • The Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer (1918)
  • Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921) [various call numbers at UCSB]
  • The Columbia Encyclopedia (6th ed., 2001) [UCSB call #: Ref AG 5 .C725 2000]
  • Columbia Gazetteer of North America (2000) [UCSB call #: Ref E 35 .C65 2000]
  • Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett (10th ed., 1919) [UCSB call #: Spec. Coll. PN 6081 .B29 1902; later editions at: PN 6081 .B29 and in Reference at: PN 6081 .B27]
  • Robert's Rules of Order Revised (1915) [UCSB call #: Ref JF515 .W42 for latest edition]
  • Roget's II: The New Thesaurus (3rd ed., 1995) [UCSB call #: Ref PE1591 .B35]
  • Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988) 'The Most Notable Quotes, 1950-1988' [UCSB call #: Ref PN 6083 .S53 1988]
  • The World Factbook (2008)
• BioMed Central
  Publisher of 187 peer-reviewed open access journals.
  
• bizjournals
  Features local business news from around the nation, top business stories from American City's print editions and industry-specific news from more than 40 industries with access to each of the 42 local business sites; contains 1.25 million business news articles published since 1996.
  
• BPubs.com The Business Publications Search Engine
  Organized by various business categories, this site provides links to full text business articles on the web.
  
• Chaucer Bibliography Online The Online Chaucer Bibliography includes materials from the Annotated Chaucer Bibliography published annually in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (call number: PR 1901 .S78) and is sponsored by the NCS and the library of the University of Texas at San Antonio. (Note: 'Title' searching is searching for the beginning of the title, not for keywords in the title.
  
• Chemistry Central
  Publishing peer-reviewed open access research in chemistry, from BioMed Central - the leading biomedical open access publisher. This site features chemistry-related articles published in Chemistry Central Journal, BioMed Central journals and independent journals utilizing BioMed Central's open access publishing services. All original research articles published by, or in cooperation with, Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.
  
• ClinicalTrials.gov
  A registry of federally and privately supported clinical trials conducted in the United States and around the world. ClinicalTrials.gov gives you information about a trial's purpose, who may participate, locations, and phone numbers for more details. This information should be used in conjunction with advice from health care professionals.
  
• Core Documents of U. S. Democracy
  To provide American citizens direct online access to the basic Federal Government documents that define our democratic society, a core group of current and historical Government publications is being made available for free, permanent, public access. In addition to full ASCII text, some documents, such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, are available as scanned images of the original manuscripts. Document texts range from the Articles of Confederation to the current United States Government Manual, Statistical Abstracts and Code of Federal Regulations.
  
• Dictionary.com
  Dictionary.com provides searchable access to several dictionaries, most notably, the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. (1996,1992) (in print at PE 1628 .A623 1992), plus Roget's Thesaurus, and links to a number of other dictionary sites on the web.
  
• Directory of Open Access Journals
  This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. Covers nearly 150,000 articles in 834 searchable journals.
  
• Energy Citations Database
  Free access to over 2.3 million science research citations with access to over 179,000 electronic documents, primarily from 1943 forward, made publicly available by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). ECD includes scientific and technical research results in disciplines of interest to DOE such as chemistry, physics, materials, environmental science, geology, engineering, mathematics, climatology, oceanography, computer science and related disciplines. It includes bibliographic citations to report literature, conference papers, journal articles, books, dissertations, and patents.
  
• English Broadside Ballad Archive
  Created by the Early Modern Center in the English Department at UCSB, the English Broadside Ballad Archive (formerly, Pepys Ballad Archive) offers a fully-searchable database of over 1,800 broadside ballads, mostly of the seventeenth century and mostly in black-letter print. The ballads were collected by Samuel Pepys into five albums, which are held at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The ballads in the database are accessible as facsimiles, as facsimile transcriptions, and as recorded songs. Also provided are full citations for the ballads as well as background essays about ballad culture of the period and Pepys’s categories for organizing his collection.
  
• Espacenet (European Patent Office)
  The European Patent Office's Esp@acenet provides detailed searching of EPO and PCT patent applications for the last 24 months, and worldwide patent documents searchable by patent number as early as 1920 for some issuing nations.
  
• FWS National Image Library
  U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's online collection of public domain still photographs, containing still photo images of wildlife, plants, National Wildlife Refuges and other scenics, as well as wildlife management work.
  
• Google Scholar
  Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
  
• Govinfo
  From the U.S. Government Printing Office: provides free electronic access to a wealth of important information products produced by the Federal Government. The information provided on this site is the official, published version.
  
• Hearth
  Hearth is a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals. Future phases of the project will include books published between 1926 and 1950, as well as additional journals. The full text of these materials, as well as bibliographies and essays on the wide array of subjects relating to Home Economics, are all freely accessible on this site.
  
• Encyclopedia.com
  Contains nearly 200,000 brief entries from the Britannica, Oxford University Press, and Columbia Encyclopedia.
  
• HighWire Press
  Free full-text articles in science disciplines, from HighWire Press at Stanford University.
  
• ibiblio
  One of the largest 'collections of collections' on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.
  
• InfoPlease
  Search the Information Please almanac and timeline, their atlas, the Columbia Encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. Information Please has been providing authoritative answers to all kinds of factual questions since 1938.
  
• Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) public nonprofit that was founded to build an 'Internet library,' with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to build more well-rounded collections. Among its most notable collections are:
  • Audio Archive
    The Archive contains over a hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download.
  • Live Music Archive
    The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree wiki to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists' commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community.
  • Moving Images Collections
    This collection of thousands of digital movies is free and open for everyone to use. It includes the Prelinger Archive, a collection of nearly 2,000 advertising and educational films from 1927 to the present.
  • Text Archive
    This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text.
    
• Library of Congress Digital Collections
  This Library of Congress project provides access to a large number of LoC collections, searchable and browsable by subject and title, including a large quantity of digitized primary source material.

• MagPortal
  'Find individual articles from many free magazines by browsing the categories or using the search engine.'
  
• Making of America: at Cornell University and University of Michigan
  Hosted at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The Cornell collection currently contains 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints while the Michigan collection contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints, estimated at over 3% of all American monographs published in the 19th century. All are in the form of searchable scanned images.
  
• MedKnow Publications
  The largest publisher in India for academic and scientific biomedical journals, publishing high quality peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Medknow, with over 40 print + online journals, is probably the largest open access publisher of print journals in the world and provides immediate free access to the electronic editions of the journals.
  
• MedlinePlus
  'Extensive information from the National Institutes of Health and other trusted sources on over 740 topics on conditions, diseases and wellness. There are also lists of hospitals and physicians, a medical encyclopedia and a medical dictionary, health information in Spanish, extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs, health information from the media, and links to thousands of clinical trials.'
  
• National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
  The official Archives of the United States government provide a variety of online primary sources including:
  • Online Exhibits
    Features high resolution images of a variety of manuscripts, artworks and photographs from the U.S. National Archives.
  • America's Historical Documents
    The National Archives preserves and provides access to the records of the Federal Government. Here is a sample of these records, from our most celebrated milestones to little-known surprises.
  • Educators & Students: Primary Sources and Activities
    A large number of collections of primary documents and images arranged for use by teachers of history, civics or use of government documents.
    
• National Forest Service Library
  Catalog of records to Forest Service Research publications dating back to 1904. Includes almost 6,000 full-text publications.
  
• National Service Center for Environmental Publications
  A database of over 24,000 full-text U.S. EPA documents
  

• NCJRS Virtual Library (National Criminal Justice Reference Service)
  Access to more than 3,500 full text publications and more than 190,000 abstracts, or summaries, of publications on this site and from NCJRS partner agency websites.
  

• O*NET OnLine
  From the U.S. Department of Labor, the Occupational Information Network is a comprehensive database of worker attributes and job characteristics. The O*NET database includes information on skills, abilities, knowledges, work activities, and interests associated with occupations. Information in O*NET is available for over 800 occupations. Each occupational title and code is based on the most current version of the Standard Occupational Classification system.O*NET replaces the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT).
  
• Online Archive of California
  The Online Archive of California is a collaborative project to create a searchable online union database of finding aids to archival collections. This database includes the finding aids to repositories from more than 90 institutions statewide including all nine UC campuses, and is continuing to expand. Finding aids provide detailed descriptions of collections, their intellectual organization and, at varying levels of analysis, of individual items in the collections. A small but increasing number of the finding aids contain links to online digital versions of the source material.
  
• The Online Books Page
  'Listing over 25,000 free books on the Web,' by author, title, subject, and other features, such as: 'A Celebration of Women Writers,' 'Banned Books Online,' 'Prize Winners Online,' 'Foreign Language,' and 'Specialty' by subject. This site also links to extensive directories which list thousands more online books.

• OSTI.gov
  Search the U.S. Dept. of Energy's scientific and technical research reports in the sciences including biology, environmental sciences, physics, energy, and other topics.

• Paper of Record
  Building the world's largest searchable archive of historical newspapers. Over 21 million images in the collection so far. Searchable newspaper image documents presented in their original published form.
  
• Project Gutenberg
  Project Gutenberg is one of the earliest attempts to provide widespread access to public domain books via the Internet. As of 2002, it offers about 6,200 works, adding about 150 per month. Files are in plain ASCII text or in zipped ASCII text, available from a number of mirror sites around the world. The Project Gutenberg catalog is searchable by author and title. Author and title lists may be downloaded by FTP.
  
• PLoS: Public Library of Science
  A nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
  
• PubMed Central (PMC)
  The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
  
• Science.gov
  Science.gov is a gateway to over 50 million pages of authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. government agencies, including research and development results.
  
• USPTO Patent Database
  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)'s Patent Databases allows searching of the bibliographic data (titles, inventors, assignees, class codes, references, etc.) or full text in US patents issued since 1976.
  
• USPTO Trademark Database
  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)'s Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searching of the key data (titles, owners, relevant dates) in current Federal trademarks and inactive ones back to 1984. Results display the trademark text data and, in many cases, the images for graphic trademarks. It does not include state or foreign trademarks.

Updated: 10/12/20

Jump to:

• 
  Microsoft SQL Server
• 
  MongoDB
• 
  Oracle Database

Managing your database without a database management tool can be tricky. You could end up with duplicate files stored in multiple locations, have trouble sharing data with people and other systems, and if your data isn’t well protected, you may also face security risks. These risks can involve spyware attacks, malware attacks, or SQL injections—all of which threaten your company’s data privacy.

Using a database management system will let you store, access, and share your business information easily. You’ll get more visibility into where your data is stored and who has access to it. The tool will also make it easier to backup and recover your business data.

Free Database Software

In this article, we’ve listed the three best free database software solutions you can try. Each of these tools (arranged alphabetically) has a minimum user rating of 4.5 out of 5 on Capterra and offers the key database software features. See the full selection methodology here.

• Free plan: Two free editions are available: SQL Server 2019 Developer and SQL Server 2019 Express. The former supports one user, is a full-featured plan, and is licensed for use as a development and test database in a non-production environment. The latter is ideal for the development of desktop, web, and small server applications.
• Paid plans: Paid editions range from $209 to $13,748 based on the licensing model and channel availability.

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management tool that works with software applications to store and fetch data as needed. It lets you run SQL queries across your database, manage both structured and unstructured data, and build machine learning models for advanced data analysis.

The software offers database encryption to keep your business information secure, even if it gets stolen. It also provides database compatibility certification, which helps ensure all your applications are compatible with the tool. The tool automatically downloads and installs updates, making the user experience convenient for you.

MongoDB

4.6/5
Read user reviews

• Free plan: Offers 512MB of storage space and is suitable for teams learning MongoDB or developing small applications.
• Paid plans: The tool offers two paid plans: Dedicated Clusters and Dedicated Multi-Region Clusters for $57 and $97 per month, respectively.

MongoDB is a NoSQL database tool that offers various queries and filters to help navigate your business data. Its multicloud data distribution functionality allows you to use multiple clouds simultaneously to store data. It also offers built-in apps such as BI Connecter and Compass to visualize and analyze your data and provide deeper insights.

The tool offers an interface via which you can access and share your data with other software applications. It helps provide a logical structure to your data and make optimal use of storage space by limiting duplicate items or values. It also helps optimize resource utilization, scale your storage needs, and meet your data recovery requirements.

Free Databases Online

• Free plan: Two free editions are available: Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse. Each option offers up to 20GB of free storage.
• Paid plans: Paid plans start at $0.1935 per unit, measured in Oracle computing unit (OCPU) per hour.

Oracle Database is a multimodel relational database management system that supports multiple structures for organizing and storing data. Some of its key features include data warehousing, database security, application development, real-time application testing, machine learning model development, and an SQL editor.

The tool’s real application clustering and portability feature allows you to scale the software per your needs, and its backup and recovery feature helps recover lost data in case of statement failure, process failure, or instance failure. It also offers performance tuning, which lets you speed up the tool’s response time when large data volumes begin to slow down the system.

Free Database Hosting

How to choose the right free database tool for your business

These considerations can make selecting a free database application a little easier:

• Double-check data security options. The tool will store your business data, including sensitive strategic or financial information. You wouldn’t want this data to fall into the hands of hackers or your competitors. Thus, ask the software provider what data security measures they will take to protect your data from unauthorized access.
• Ask about additional costs. Most database tools, including the ones mentioned in this article, involve extra charges for some services. These could be hosting charges, cost for additional storage space, or data migration costs. But these costs may not be explicitly mentioned on the product website or may be hidden in some obscure corner of a webpage. Therefore, check with the vendor if there’ll be any additional charges in the future.
• Check the tool’s complexity level. Database tools can be fairly complex to work with. As the tool will also be used by business departments other than your IT team, make sure everyone is comfortable with its complexity level. When choosing a product, be sure to get buy-in from all the teams that’ll be working with the tool.
• Read product reviews. Before finalizing a tool, read its user reviews on third-party websites such as ours. Reviews will help you understand the tool’s performance, features, and pros and cons in more detail. Check out this article to learn how to make the most of user reviews.

Common questions to ask when selecting a free database software tool

Here are a few questions you can ask the software provider to learn more about the key aspects of the database management app you’re planning to purchase:

• Which programming languages does the tool support? Check with the software provider if the tool supports programming languages of your choice. While most database software tools support multiple query languages, some are compatible with only a few specific ones. Thus, make sure the tool supports your preferred query language.
• Does the tool support third-party integrations? You may need to integrate the tool with your data visualization, business intelligence, data warehouse, or CRM software to carry out diverse operations on your data or to extract relevant information. So, ensure the tool you select supports integration with third-party solutions.
• What kind of support options are available? Database tools can be complex to work with, and any issue with the tool can affect the other software apps whose data is managed by the tool. So, check with the software provider about the support options they offer. See if these options are available for free or come at an additional cost. Also, make sure customer support is available during your working hours.

How we evaluated products

This article was updated on March 11, 2021. Products considered for this article had to:

• Be included in Capterra’s Top 20 Database Management Software report.
• Offer a free, stand-alone version of the software (not a trial version of the software where you must purchase a product after a limited amount of time).
• Meet our database management system market definition: Database management software, or DBMS, helps users interact with databases across the business to retrieve, edit, delete, backup, etc., data.

Software that met the market definition also needed an above-average overall user rating compared to other products in the category.

Free Database Software Download

• “Best” free tools had a minimum overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars from reviewers on Capterra at the time of publication.