Comparison
AddisDB vs DbVisualizer
A long-established cross-platform client with strong diagramming, where most of what you want is behind the Pro edition.
Engine breadth
How many database engines and data-file formats it can actually open.
DbVisualizer — Good
30+ engines over JDBC, including the enterprise ones — Oracle, Db2, SQL Server, Informix — that lighter clients skip.
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.
DbVisualizer — Limited
A free edition exists but omits a lot: table management, data editing, query builders, import/export and AI are all Pro. Pro is $199/user for the first year then $89/year to renew, or $229/$119 with premium support. Each subscription carries a perpetual licence for versions released during the term. Not 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.
DbVisualizer — Good
Windows, macOS, Linux and UNIX, including Arm64 and Apple Silicon builds. Java-based.
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.
DbVisualizer — Limited
Permissions and connection-level restrictions, and a clear separation between environments. No statement classification stopping a destructive write.
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.
DbVisualizer — Limited
AI assistance exists but is Pro-only, so it is unavailable in the free edition.
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.
DbVisualizer — Good
Genuinely good ER diagramming — one of its strengths — plus schema comparison in Pro.
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
DbVisualizer does not match AddisDB on any of these six — but see the note on maturity, which is a real advantage this comparison does not measure.
AddisDB comes out ahead on: Engine breadth, Cost & openness, Platform reach, Production safety, AI capability, Schema tooling.
Which one to pick
Pick DbVisualizer if…
You are on enterprise databases like Db2 or Informix, or you want the best ER diagramming in the group and are willing to pay Pro for it.
Pick AddisDB if…
The free edition being missing data editing, import/export and AI is a dealbreaker — AddisDB gives you the whole client free for local databases.
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.