[opensourcedex]

Beekeeper Studio is a free, open source databases project written in TypeScript and released under a custom open-source licence. It has 23,837 GitHub stars, 1,663 forks and 1,168 open issues, and was last pushed 13 hours ago. On this registry it ranks #25 of 206 tracked projects in Databases, with 5 head-to-head comparisons available. It gained 143 stars over the last 30 tracked days.

What is Beekeeper Studio?

Beekeeper Studio is a cross-platform, open-source SQL editor and database manager for Linux, macOS, and Windows that gives developers and data teams one graphical client for many different database engines.

What it is

Beekeeper Studio is a desktop application that combines a SQL editor with a database manager. It is built with Electron, written largely in TypeScript, and published as binaries for macOS, Windows, and Linux. From a single interface it connects to relational and non-relational engines including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQL Server, MariaDB, CockroachDB, TiDB, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Redis, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, Oracle Database, Firebird, LibSQL, ClickHouse, DuckDB, and GreengageDB. The project lives in the same ecosystem as the database servers it fronts rather than in the server stack itself, and it is aimed at anyone who has to open more than one engine on a given day.

The concrete problem it solves is client sprawl. Rather than installing and learning a separate vendor-specific graphical client for each engine, a user installs one application and points it at whichever connection is relevant. The free edition carries no sign-up, registration, or credit card requirement, so the friction of trying it is a download. Most of the repository is open source under the GPLv3 licence; the paid features are also present in the same repository under a commercial source-available licence.

Key capabilities

  • One client covers a long engine list, with full support marked for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQL Server, MariaDB, CockroachDB, TiDB, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Redis, and GreengageDB in the community edition.
  • Oracle Database, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, Firebird, LibSQL, ClickHouse, and DuckDB are listed as full support in the paid editions only; ScyllaDB works through the Cassandra driver as a drop-in compatible target.
  • Cross-platform binaries are published for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the README linking downloads from beekeeperstudio.io/get-community.
  • Per-engine connection documentation is published at paths such as docs.beekeeperstudio.io/user_guide/connecting/sqlite, .../cockroachdb, .../bigquery, .../redis, .../oracle, .../firebird, and .../clickhouse.
  • The README is maintained in translation, with files including README.pt-br.md, README-es.md, README-de.md, README-fr.md, README-el.md, README-ja.md, README-it.md, README-ko.md, README-id.md, and README-sw.md alongside the English original.
  • The project welcomes community contributions, and the free and paid feature sets coexist in one repository rather than splitting into separate codebases.
  • The Electron and TypeScript stack is listed among the repository topics together with bigquery, cassandra, cockroachdb, firebird, mariadb, mssql, mysql, and postgresql.

Who uses it and how

  • Teams that run several engines at once — for example MySQL or MariaDB alongside PostgreSQL — use a single installed client instead of maintaining a separate tool per engine.
  • Analytics-oriented users connect to Google BigQuery, ClickHouse, or DuckDB from the same application they use for transactional databases.
  • Users of distributed systems such as CockroachDB and TiDB have dedicated connection guidance in the documentation.
  • Redis users can work with a key-value store in the same client that opens their relational databases.
  • Developers working with local file databases such as SQLite and LibSQL can open them directly in a desktop application with no server component to run.
  • Non-English-speaking teams are served by the translated README files covering Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Greek, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Indonesian, and Swahili.

Getting started

Download the free binaries for macOS, Windows, or Linux from the link given in the README at beekeeperstudio.io/get-community. No sign-up, registration, or credit card is required for the free edition; premium features are unlocked with a paid licence described on the project's pricing page.

How it compares

No comparable tool and no list of replaced paid products appears in the facts provided, so Beekeeper Studio stands alone in this registry entry. The distinguishing facts available are its dual licensing model — GPLv3 for most of the code and a commercial source-available licence for the paid features kept in the same repository — and a cost model where the free tier is unlimited in time but restricted in engine coverage.

When to use it — and when not to

This is a desktop client, not a service: the facts describe no server, database, or mail component that a self-hoster must operate, which makes adoption cheap but also means there is nothing to deploy for a team that wants browser-based or headless access. Anyone who needs every feature under one uniform open-source licence should look carefully, because the repository mixes GPLv3 code with commercially licensed paid features, and the registry metadata reports the licence as NOASSERTION rather than a clean identifier. The repository also carries 1,168 open issues, so a prospective user should weigh the free-tier engine limits and the maintenance backlog against the convenience of a single cross-platform client.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

🌐 EN | PT-BR | ES | DE | FR | EL | JA | IT | KO | ID | SW

Beekeeper Studio

Beekeeper Studio is a cross-platform SQL editor and database manager available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Download Beekeeper Studio

We publish binaries for MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

image

Beekeeper Studio is free to download and provides a lot of features for free, no sign-up, registration, or credit card required. The app provides some premium features for a reasonable cost license fee. Learn more here

Most of the code in this repo is open source under the GPLv3 license. Paid features are also in this repository under a commercial source-available license.

We welcome community contributions!

Supported Databases

Database Support Community Paid Editions Beekeeper Links
PostgreSQL ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features
MySQL ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features
SQLite ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features, Docs
SQL Server ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features
Amazon Redshift ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features
CockroachDB ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features, Docs
MariaDB ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features
TiDB ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features
Google BigQuery ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features, Docs
Redis ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Features, Docs
GreengageDB ⭐ Full Support ✅ ✅ Docs
Oracle Database ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features, Docs
Cassandra ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features
ScyllaDB ⭐ Full Support (via Cassandra driver) ✅ Drop-in compatible with Cassandra
Firebird ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features, Docs
LibSQL ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features
ClickHouse ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features, Docs
DuckDB ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features, Docs
SQL Anywhere ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features
MongoDB ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features, Docs
Trino / Presto ⭐ Full Support ✅ Features, Docs
SurrealDB ⭐ Full Support ✅ Docs
DynamoDB 🧪 Beta Support ✅ Features, Docs
Snowflake ⏳ Coming Soon ✅ --

Editions of Beekeeper Studio

Beekeeper Studio is a single download with in-app upgrades for premium features.

We'd love to make Beekeeper Studio totally free for everyone, but building good software is hard work and expensive. We think our paid editions are fairly priced, I hope you do too.

👉 Compare Beekeeper Studio Editions

Beekeeper Studio Features

Top feature: It's smooth 🍫, fast 🏎, and you'll actually enjoy using it 🥰

  • Truly cross-platform: Windows, MacOS, and Linux
  • Autocomplete SQL query editor with syntax highlighting
  • Tabbed interface, so you can multitask
  • Sort and filter table data to find just what you need
  • Sensible keyboard-shortcuts
  • Save queries for later
  • Query run-history, so you can find that one query you got working 3 days ago
  • Great dark theme
  • Import/export
  • Backup/restore
  • View data as JSON
  • Loads more

Our approach to UX

One of our frustrations with other open-source SQL editors and database managers is that they take a 'kitchen sink' approach to features, adding so many features that the UI becomes cluttered and hard to navigate. We wanted a good looking, open source SQL workbench that's powerful, but also easy to use. We couldn't find one, so we created Beekeeper Studio!

Generally our guiding star is to only build software that 'feels good' to use. That means at the very least we value Beekeeper being fast, straightforward to use, and modern. If a new feature compromises this vision, we kill it.

Supporting Beekeeper Studio

We love working on Beekeeper Studio, and we'd love to keep growing and improving it forever. To do that I need your help.

The best way to support Beekeeper Studio is to purchase a paid license. Every purchase directly supports our work on Beekeeper Studio.

If you're at a business and using Beekeeper Studio for your job, you should probably get your boss to buy you a license.

If you can't afford a license, please use the free version, that's why we make a free version!

Thank you for your continued support!

Documentation

Check out docs.beekeeperstudio.io for user guides, FAQs, troubleshooting tips, and more.

License

Beekeeper Studio Community Edition (the code in this repository) is licensed under the GPLv3 license.

Beekeeper Studio Ultimate Edition contains extra features and is licensed under a commercial end user agreement (EULA).

Beekeeper Studio's trademarks (words marks and logos) are not open source. See our trademark guidelines for more information.

Third party assets bundled with the app, such as the database icons, are credited in ATTRIBUTIONS.md.

Trademark Guidelines

Trademarks can be complicated with open source projects, so we have adapted a set of standard guidelines for using our trademarks that are common to many open source projects.

If you are just using the Beekeeper Studio app, and you are not forking or distributing Beekeeper Studio code in any way, these probably don't apply to you.

👉 Beekeeper Studio Trademark Guidelines

Contributing to Beekeeper Studio

We love any community engagement. Even if you're complaining because you don't like something about the app!

Contributor Agreements

  • Building an inclusive and welcoming community is important to us, so please follow our code of conduct as you engage with the project.

  • By contributing to the project you agree to the terms of our contributor guidelines.

Contribute without coding

We have you covered, read our guide to contributing in 10 minutes without coding.

Compiling and Running Beekeeper Studio Locally

Want to write some code and improve Beekeeper Studio? Getting set-up is easy on Mac, Linux, or Windows.

# First: Install NodeJS 20, NPM, and Yarn
# ...

# 1. Fork the Beekeeper Studio Repo (click fork button at top right of this screen)
# 2. Check out your fork:
git clone git@github.com:<your-username>/beekeeper-studio.git beekeeper-studio
cd beekeeper-studio/
yarn set version classic
nvm use 22
yarn install # installs dependencies


# Now you can start the app:
yarn run electron:serve ## the app will now start

If you get error:03000086:digital envelope routines::initialization error, you'll have to update openssl.

  • On Ubuntu/Debian:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade openssl
  • On CentOS/RHEL:
sudo yum update openssl
  • On macOS (using Homebrew):
brew update
brew upgrade openssl

Where to make changes?

This repo is now a monorepo, we have several places with code, but only really a couple of important entry points.

All app code lives in apps/studio, some shared code lives in shared/src. This is shared with other apps.

Beekeeper Studio has two entry points:

  • background.js - this is the electron-side code that controls native things like showing windows.
  • main.js - this is the entry point for the Vue.js app. You can follow the Vue component breadcrumbs from App.vue to find the screen you need.

Generally we have two 'screens':

  • ConnectionInterface - connecting to a DB
  • CoreInterface - interacting with a database

How to submit a change?

  • Push your changes to your repository and open a Pull Request from our github page (this page)
  • Make sure to write some notes about what your change does! A gif is always welcome for visual changes.

Maintainer notes (casual readers can ignore this stuff)

Upgrading Electron Gotchas

This is always a total pain and will break the build 9/10.

Some things you need to consider when upgrading Electron:

  1. Does it use a different node version. Eg Electron-18 uses node 14, 22 uses node 16. So everyone needs to upgrade
  2. Does node-abi need to be upgraded to be able to understand the electron version? This is used in the build to fetch prebuilt packages. You need to upgrade this in root/package.json#resolutions
  3. Were any APIs deprecated or removed? Make sure all features that interact with the Electron APIs still work, stuff like - selecting a file, maximizing a window, running a query, etc.

Release Process

  1. Up the version number in package.json
  2. Replace build/release-notes.md with the latest release notes. Follow the format that is there.
  • run git log ..HEAD --oneline | grep 'Merge pull' to find PRs merged
  1. Commit
  2. Push to master
  3. Create a tag git tag v. It must start with a 'v'
  4. git push origin
  • Now wait for the build/publish action to complete on Github
  1. Push the new release live
  • Go to the new 'draft' release on the releases tab of github, edit the notes, publish
  • Log into snapcraft.io, drag the uploaded release into the 'stable' channel for each architecture.

This should also publish the latest docs

Post Release:

  1. Copy release notes to a blog post, post on website
  2. Tweet link
  3. Share on LinkedIn
  4. Send to mailing list on SendInBlue

Big Thanks

Beekeeper Studio wouldn't exist without Sqlectron-core, the core database libraries from the Sqlectron project. Beekeeper Studio started as an experimental fork of that repository. A big thanks to @maxcnunes and the rest of the Sqlectron community.

The original license from sqlectron-core is included here:

Copyright (c) 2015 The SQLECTRON Team

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Frequently asked questions

Is Beekeeper Studio free to use?

Beekeeper Studio is open source. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Beekeeper Studio do?

Modern and intuitive SQL client for multiple databases

What is Beekeeper Studio written in?

Beekeeper Studio is primarily written in TypeScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/beekeeper-studio/beekeeper-studio, and it has 23,837 GitHub stars.