Sequel Pro vs Navicat vs TablePlus - Quick Comparison

Sequel Pro vs Navicat vs TablePlus - Quick Comparison

October 12, 2018

A good GUI Client will help you work with database a lot faster and easier. Let’s have a quick look at three GUI tools: Sequel Pro, Navicat, TablePlus, and compare pros and cons to see which tool is better for your needs.

An overview:

• Sequel Pro is a fast, easy-to-use Mac database management application for working with MySQL databases. It was started as a fork from the abandoned project CocoaMySQL.
• Navicat is a series of graphical database management and design tool for MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Oracle, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server.
• TablePlus is a modern, native GUI client that allows developers and DBAs to simultaneously access, query, edit, and manage multiple databases, including MySQL.

Supported platforms:

• Sequel Pro is available on Mac only. Currently, there’s no plan for other platforms such as Windows or Linux.
• Navicat is cross-platform. It’s available on Mac, Windows, Linux. Navicat also has its iOS versions.
• When first started out, TablePlus has a native version for Mac only. A native version for Windows was just released recently.

Supported drivers:

• At the moment, Sequel Pro only works with MySQL up to 5.7. Since the recent MySQL 8.0 came out, it’s reported that Sequel Pro can’t connect to MySQL 8.0, it’s not working properly or just crashing.
• Navicat supports several popular databases: MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Oracle, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server.
• TablePlus supports a handful of relational databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, MariaDB, CockroachDB, Vertica, Oracle; also Cassandra and Redis.

Pricing structure:

• Sequel Pro is free and open source. Anyone can download and use for free.
• Navicat is a commercial application with 14 days trial and it has many pricing schemes. You can either buy a special edition for MySQL with $119 for Non-Commercial Edition, $199 for Standard Edition, and $299 for Enterprise Edition; or you can buy Navicat Premium to work with all supported drivers at the price of $1299 for Enterprise Edition and $599 for Non-Commercial Edition.
• TablePlus has a free version and an upgraded version. They are both identical in term of features set. The free version has a full set of features and you can use forever, but it limited to 2 opening tabs/connections/filters at a time. The license costs $49 to remove all those limitations.

1. Sequel Pro

Sequel Pro has been long known for being one of the best GUI tools for MySQL, only until recently when it has compatibility issues with MySQL 8 and Mojave.

Pros:

• Very clean and simple interface. It’s easy for newbies to get started.
• It runs fast.
• Easy to import/export databases.
• Connections over SSH
• Full user management, credentials, and roles
• Filtering/Sorting data based on single constraint including equal to/in/like/between etc.
• Sanity check or data integrity check.
• It’s free

Cons:

• Crashes very often and random. This is a big problem in the current (2016 to present) version of Sequel Pro.
• Available for Mac only. The development is also really slow, if not halted.
• Some long-running queries can be very slow and fail to stop.
• Autosuggestion is slow and not so smart.
• Error messages aren’t typically verbose enough to really debug a query without resorting to EXPLAIN queries.

2. Navicat

Navicat offers a powerful tool for both database development and administration.

Pros:

• It’s cross-platform and supports multiple drivers.
• Data and structure synchronization
• Visual query builder and report builder
• Excellent import/export options
• Supports many languages, including Polish, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, French, and English
• Compatible with other Navicat products: Navicat Monitor, Navicat Data Modeler, Navicat Report Viewer, and Navicat Data Model Essentials.

Cons:

• It’s expensive. A single machine license for the most standard version (MySQL) is already $299. If you work with more than one drivers, such as PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or SQLite, you will end up purchase the Navicat premium package at $1,299.
• It’s one of the most resource-intensive tools. It’s heavy and will consume a large portion of memory to run.
• Very few shortcut keys.

3. TablePlus

With a native build, TablePlus provides a very powerful yet lightweight tool for managing MySQL database.

Pros:

• Native build for Mac. It’s fast, light, and stable. It can start in less than half a second.
• It’s portable. No complicated installation, no special requirement.
• Clean and simple interface.
• Connections over SSH
• Multiple conditions data filter
• Queries history and keyword binding favorite.
• Streaming results and async loading to show queries results faster and doesn’t block the UI.
• Very quick inline editing for table data, structure, and query results.
• Smart query editor with highlight syntax, instant autocomplete, SQL reformat.
• A plugin system.
• Dark theme included.
• Every function has an assigned shortcut key.

Cons:

• No Linux version.
• User management is not currently supported
• There’s no ERD Diagram feature