Best Free Offline-First Databases of 2025

Firebase is an invaluable resource for developing and managing successful applications, gaining popularity among development teams ranging from startups to large corporations, thanks to its robust backing by Google. It offers a suite of reliable products and solutions that accompany your app throughout its lifecycle. You can easily automate routine development tasks by installing pre-packaged, open-source code bundles. Furthermore, Firebase allows seamless integration with your team's preferred tools, enabling you to tackle intricate challenges and enhance the overall user experience of your app. Whether you want to personalize the onboarding process, boost user engagement, or introduce new features, Firebase has you covered. With comprehensive documentation and cross-platform SDKs, Firebase supports app building and deployment across Android, iOS, web platforms, C++, and Unity. You can discover how to initiate a Firebase project, register your applications, and incorporate the Firebase SDKs tailored to your specific platform—be it iOS, Android, or the web. Additionally, you can delve into Firebase project concepts, explore detailed insights into project permissions and management systems, and prepare your application for launch effectively, ensuring that you have all the tools necessary for a successful deployment. Overall, Firebase stands as a pivotal ally in the app development arena.

SQLite is a C-language library that offers a compact, efficient, and reliable SQL database engine that is fully featured. Recognized as the most popular database engine globally, SQLite is embedded in every mobile device and the majority of computers, while also being included in a myriad of applications that are used daily by individuals. Operating as an in-process library, SQLite provides a self-sufficient, serverless, and zero-configuration transactional SQL database engine. The source code of SQLite resides in the public domain, making it available for anyone to use freely, whether for commercial or personal purposes. With its extensive deployment and integration into numerous applications, SQLite stands out as an invaluable tool for developers in various high-profile projects. Its versatility and ease of use contribute to its unmatched popularity in the database landscape.

Cloud Firestore is a highly efficient, fully managed, serverless NoSQL document database designed to streamline the storage, synchronization, and querying of data for mobile, web, and IoT applications on a global scale. It features client libraries that ensure real-time synchronization and offline capabilities, while its security measures and seamless integrations with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) facilitate the rapid development of genuinely serverless applications. With an emphasis on providing an excellent developer experience, Firestore incorporates built-in live synchronization, offline support, and ACID transactions, all accessible through a comprehensive array of client and server-side libraries. The system automatically adjusts to varying demand levels, eliminating the need for maintenance and delivering impressive availability rates between 99.99% and 99.999% through reliable data replication. Operating as a no-operations database, it allows users to pay solely for what they consume, avoiding upfront costs and issues related to underutilization of resources. Its simplified architecture enables direct communication between your applications and Firestore, enhancing overall efficiency and performance. Additionally, the continuous updates and improvements to the platform ensure that developers can leverage the latest features and security enhancements effortlessly.

PouchDB is a free and open-source JavaScript database that draws inspiration from Apache CouchDB and is optimized for efficient operation within web browsers. This innovative tool empowers applications to locally store data while offline, enabling synchronization with CouchDB and compatible servers once the user is back online, maintaining data consistency across different sessions. It boasts cross-browser compatibility and is lightweight, needing only a simple script tag and 46KB (when gzipped) to function in the browser, or it can be easily installed through npm. With a straightforward learning curve that requires some programming familiarity, PouchDB is entirely open-source, and its development is transparently managed on GitHub. Developers can leverage PouchDB to create applications that operate smoothly both online and offline, ensuring a reliable user experience irrespective of internet connectivity. It features an intuitive API that facilitates the creation, reading, updating, and deletion of documents, thereby streamlining the development process. This flexibility makes PouchDB a valuable tool for modern web applications that prioritize user accessibility and data integrity.

RxDB is a NoSQL database designed for local-first use, particularly suited for contemporary web and mobile applications. It facilitates offline-first capabilities by saving data directly on the client side through various storage engines such as IndexedDB, OPFS, and SQLite. With real-time reactivity, RxDB allows developers to monitor changes in documents, fields, or queries, which means that UI components can reflect data updates instantly. Its adaptable replication engine offers synchronization with multiple backends and custom endpoints, providing flexibility for various use cases. Furthermore, RxDB easily integrates with different frameworks and environments, enhancing its usability. Key features include field-level encryption, schema validation, conflict resolution, backup and restoration options, as well as support for attachments and CRDTs. By minimizing server demands and enabling rapid local queries, RxDB significantly boosts performance and scalability, making it a prime choice for applications that need real-time updates, offline functionality, and uniformity across platforms. The combination of these capabilities positions RxDB as a forward-thinking solution for developers aiming to build efficient and responsive applications.

IndexedDB serves as a fundamental API designed for the client-side storage of large volumes of structured data, including files and blobs. It utilizes indexing to facilitate efficient searches, making it suitable for extensive datasets. While traditional web storage can handle smaller data quantities well, it falls short when it comes to managing larger structured datasets, a gap that IndexedDB effectively fills. Functioning as a transactional database system akin to SQL-based Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), IndexedDB diverges from them by operating as a JavaScript-based object-oriented database. This distinction allows it to store and retrieve objects indexed by keys, with support for any objects that comply with the structured clone algorithm. Users must outline the database schema, establish a connection, and execute retrieval and updating of data through a series of transactions. Additionally, like other web storage solutions, IndexedDB adheres to the same-origin policy, ensuring data security and integrity across different domains. With its versatility and capability, IndexedDB has become an essential tool for developers dealing with complex data needs on the web.

Dexie.js serves as a streamlined and dependable wrapper for IndexedDB, aimed at making client-side storage management more approachable. With a minified and gzipped size of around 29k, it presents a straightforward API that tackles the intricate challenges posed by the native IndexedDB, including inconsistent error management, inefficient querying, a lack of reactivity, and overall code complexity. The library is built upon a thoughtfully crafted API, featuring strong error handling, the ability to extend functionality, and awareness of change tracking, in addition to enhanced KeyRange capabilities for diverse operations such as case-insensitive searches, set matches, and OR conditions. By adhering to the IndexedDB specification and leveraging its complete feature set, Dexie.js allows developers to seamlessly interact with existing IndexedDB data without any requirement for data migration. Additionally, it supports real-time composable queries, permitting components to reflect database changes instantaneously across multiple front-end frameworks like React, Svelte, Vue, and Angular. Furthermore, with the integration of Dexie Cloud, developers can create reliable, authenticated, and access-controlled local-first applications with minimal additional coding effort. This combination of features makes Dexie.js a highly valuable tool for modern web development, particularly when managing client-side data efficiently.

WatermelonDB is a cutting-edge reactive database framework tailored for the development of robust React and React Native applications that can efficiently scale from a few hundred to tens of thousands of records while maintaining high speed. It guarantees immediate app launches, regardless of the amount of data, incorporates lazy loading to fetch data only when necessary, and features offline-first capabilities along with synchronization with your own backend systems. This framework is designed to be multiplatform. Specifically optimized for React, it facilitates uncomplicated data integration into components and is framework-agnostic, allowing developers to use its JavaScript API in conjunction with various other UI frameworks. Built on a solid SQLite infrastructure, WatermelonDB offers static typing through Flow or TypeScript, while also providing optional reactivity via an RxJS API. It effectively tackles performance challenges in complex applications by deferring data loading until explicitly requested and executing all queries directly on SQLite in a dedicated native thread, which ensures that the majority of queries are resolved almost instantly. Additionally, this innovative framework supports seamless data management, making it a versatile choice for developers aiming to enhance the performance and responsiveness of their applications.

Realm is an innovative, mobile-centric open-source object database specifically engineered to operate seamlessly on phones, tablets, and wearable devices. By offering a straightforward, object-oriented data model, it eliminates the necessity for an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) layer, allowing developers to create models using standard classes in popular programming languages such as Swift, Java, Kotlin, C#, JavaScript, Dart, and C++. Its design prioritizes high efficiency and minimal memory footprint through techniques like zero-copy architecture, lazy loading, and multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), ensuring safe operations across multiple threads. Realm's live objects and collections synchronize automatically across threads, providing a foundation for reactive programming methodologies. Furthermore, it allows for the establishment of intricate data structures by enabling relationships between objects through links and backlinks. Developers can also take advantage of tools like Realm Studio to explore and modify local Realm databases, facilitating integration with a variety of platforms, including React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, and Node.js. This adaptability makes Realm a compelling choice for developers looking to manage data efficiently in their mobile applications.

OrbitDB functions as a decentralized, serverless, peer-to-peer database that leverages IPFS for data storage and utilizes Libp2p Pubsub for seamless synchronization among peers. It incorporates Merkle-CRDTs to facilitate conflict-free writing and merging of database entries, making it ideal for decentralized applications, blockchain projects, and web apps designed to operate primarily offline. The platform provides a range of database types that cater to distinct requirements: 'events' serves as immutable append-only logs, 'documents' allows for JSON document storage indexed by specific keys, 'keyvalue' offers conventional key-value pair storage, and 'keyvalue-indexed' provides LevelDB-indexed key-value data. Each of these database types is constructed on OpLog, a structure that is immutable, cryptographically verifiable, and based on operation-driven CRDT principles. The JavaScript implementation is compatible with both browser and Node.js environments, while a version in Go is actively maintained by the Berty project, ensuring a wide range of support for developers. This flexibility and adaptability make OrbitDB a powerful choice for those looking to implement modern data solutions in distributed systems.

Utilize Core Data to store your application's persistent data for offline access, cache temporary information, and implement undo features on a single device. For syncing data across various devices linked to the same iCloud account, Core Data seamlessly replicates your schema into a CloudKit container. You can specify your data types and relationships using Core Data’s Data model editor, which also allows for the generation of corresponding class definitions. At runtime, Core Data is capable of managing object instances, enabling a variety of functionalities. It simplifies the process of connecting your objects to a storage solution, allowing for straightforward data saving from both Swift and Objective-C without requiring direct database management. The undo manager in Core Data monitors changes, offering the ability to revert them individually, collectively, or all at once, thus facilitating easy integration of undo and redo capabilities in your application. Additionally, it is advisable to execute potentially UI-blocking operations, such as converting JSON into objects, in the background to maintain a smooth user experience. By doing so, your application will not only enhance its performance but also ensure that users remain engaged without interruptions.

Berkeley DB encompasses a suite of embedded key-value database libraries that deliver scalable and high-performance data management functionalities for various applications. Its products utilize straightforward function-call APIs for accessing and managing data efficiently. With Berkeley DB, developers can create tailored data management solutions that bypass the typical complexities linked with custom projects. The library offers a range of reliable building-block technologies that can be adapted to meet diverse application requirements, whether for handheld devices or extensive data centers, catering to both local storage needs and global distribution, handling data volumes that range from kilobytes to petabytes. This versatility makes Berkeley DB a preferred choice for developers looking to implement efficient data solutions.

GUN is a real-time, decentralized, and offline-first graph database engine that allows for seamless data storage, loading, and sharing within applications without the need to manage servers, network requests, or handle issues related to offline changes or concurrency conflicts. This lightweight, efficient data synchronization and storage system operates wherever JavaScript is supported, enabling developers to concentrate on their app's data needs rather than technical hurdles. By using GUN, you can rapidly create innovative applications while harnessing powerful internet capabilities such as decentralization and genuine privacy, ultimately contributing to a freer and more open web. GUN serves as a versatile database engine that operates across browsers, mobile devices, and servers, empowering you to configure your ideal data management system. With GUN, you can build applications with enhanced functionality while ensuring user privacy and eliminating dependencies on traditional infrastructures.

FairCom EDGE makes it easy to integrate sensor and machine data at their source - be that a factory, water treatment facility, oil platform, wind farm, or other industrial site. FairCom EDGE is the first converged IoT/Industrial IoT hub in the world. It unifies messaging and persistence with an all-in one solution. It also offers browser-based administration, configuration, and monitoring. FairCom EDGE supports MQTT, OPC UA and SQL for machine-tomachine (M2M), communication, and HTTP/REST for monitoring and real-time reporting. It constantly retrieves data from sensors and devices with OPC UA support and receives messages from machines with MQTT support. The data is automatically parsed and persisted, and made available via MQTT or SQL.

Couchbase distinguishes itself from other NoSQL databases by delivering an enterprise-grade, multicloud to edge solution that is equipped with the powerful features essential for mission-critical applications on a platform that is both highly scalable and reliable. This distributed cloud-native database operates seamlessly in contemporary dynamic settings, accommodating any cloud environment, whether it be customer-managed or a fully managed service. Leveraging open standards, Couchbase merges the advantages of NoSQL with the familiar structure of SQL, thereby facilitating a smoother transition from traditional mainframe and relational databases. Couchbase Server serves as a versatile, distributed database that integrates the benefits of relational database capabilities, including SQL and ACID transactions, with the adaptability of JSON, all built on a foundation that is remarkably fast and scalable. Its applications span various industries, catering to needs such as user profiles, dynamic product catalogs, generative AI applications, vector search, high-speed caching, and much more, making it an invaluable asset for organizations seeking efficiency and innovation.

It is a highly scalable, embedded SQL database that can be accessed from anywhere. It also includes commercial-grade data security, disaster recovery, change synchronization, and data security.