Comparison
AddisDB vs Beekeeper Studio
A clean, friendly, open-source client that does the everyday things well and does not try to be an IDE.
Engine breadth
How many database engines and data-file formats it can actually open.
Beekeeper Studio — Limited
The common ones — Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, and a handful more. The Community Edition covers "common databases"; the full set is a paid tier, so engine breadth is partly a pricing question here.
AddisDB — Strong
95 engines and data-file formats, from Postgres and MySQL through Mongo, Redis, Cassandra and Neo4j to Snowflake, BigQuery, ClickHouse and local CSV/Parquet/GeoJSON. Every engine is on every plan, including the free one.
Cost & openness
What it costs to use for real work, and whether you can read the source.
Beekeeper Studio — Strong
Community Edition is free under an OSI-approved licence, with no tab limits and unlimited connections, intended for individuals and organizations under 10 employees or $1M revenue. Paid tiers run $9/month (Indie), $14/month (Professional) and $18/month (Business) billed yearly. Some newer code is source-available rather than open source.
AddisDB — Good
Free forever for databases on your own machine — the whole client, every engine, no account and no card. $49/year to reach databases that are not local; $99/user/year for teams; $299/user/year for SSO, audit log and RBAC. Source is not public.
Platform reach
Which operating systems and surfaces it runs on.
Beekeeper Studio — Good
Windows, macOS and Linux. Electron, so heavier than the Rust clients but lighter than the Java ones.
AddisDB — Strong
macOS, Windows and Linux as a native app, plus a CLI with a TUI and a VS Code extension that share the same core.
Production safety
What stands between you and the wrong statement on a production database.
Beekeeper Studio — Limited
A read-only connection mode, which is the main guardrail. No statement classification or migration review.
AddisDB — Strong
Connections can be marked read-only; statements are classified before they run, so an unqualified DELETE or a DROP is stopped rather than reported afterwards. A prod environment tag adds write guards, and row-count thresholds catch the statement that would hit more rows than you meant.
AI capability
What the AI does, what it costs, and where your schema and keys go.
Beekeeper Studio — Limited
An AI Shell is available on paid tiers. Not present in the Community Edition most people run.
AddisDB — Strong
Plain-English to SQL, schema-aware, with the generated statement shown for you to edit before it runs. Bring your own provider key: it is stored in the OS credential store, calls go straight to your provider, and AI is included on the free tier because we are not the ones paying for the tokens.
Schema tooling
Diagrams, diffs, and getting a schema change from your laptop to production.
Beekeeper Studio — Limited
Table structure editing and straightforward browsing. No ERD or schema diff — it is honest about being a SQL editor and table browser.
AddisDB — Strong
ERD of tables and foreign keys, schema diff between databases, and a migration preview that shows the exact SQL plus the dangerous parts — dropped columns, rewrites, locks — before anything runs. Reads Drizzle Kit and Prisma changes too.
The scoreboard
Beekeeper Studio matches or beats AddisDB on: Cost & openness.
AddisDB comes out ahead on: Engine breadth, Platform reach, Production safety, AI capability, Schema tooling.
Which one to pick
Pick Beekeeper Studio if…
You want a clean, friendly, open-source client for everyday work on common databases, and you would rather have less software than more.
Pick AddisDB if…
Your engine is not in the Community set, or you want migration review and AI without moving to a paid tier.
About this comparison
Ratings and prices were checked against each vendor's own pages on 2026-08-11. We wrote this and we make one of the tools in it, so read it as what it is — and if something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.