At a glance
| DumpCat | MySQL Enterprise Backup | |
|---|---|---|
| Price and license | Free and open source (Apache-2.0). No account, no license key. | Proprietary, part of a MySQL Enterprise Edition subscription; Oracle's store lists Enterprise Edition subscriptions from US$5,350. |
| How it runs | Self-hosted: one binary with a web UI, running as a systemd or Windows service next to your database. | The mysqlbackup command-line tool. |
| Platforms | Linux (amd64, arm64) and Windows (64-bit). | Linux / Unix and Windows. |
| Databases | MySQL 5.7, 8.0, 8.4, Percona Server, MariaDB 10.x and 11.x. | Oracle MySQL only, matched to the server version (MEB 8.4.11 supports server 8.4.3 and later). Not MariaDB. |
| Backup methods | Logical with mysqldump / mariadb-dump or parallel mydumper; hot physical backups with XtraBackup / MariaBackup, including incrementals. No locks on InnoDB. | Physical: hot for InnoDB, warm (read-only) for other tables. Full, differential, incremental and partial backups; table-level restore; redo log archiving. |
| Point-in-time recovery | Yes. Continuous binlog archiving; restore to a timestamp, a binlog position or just before a GTID. | Yes, using the binlogs in the backup; the restore steps are manual. |
| Storage | Local disk / NFS, S3 and compatibles, Google Drive, OneDrive, SFTP, FTP / FTPS, WebDAV, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob, Dropbox and every rclone backend; several per job. | Local disk, Oracle Cloud (OCI), S3-compatible, OpenStack Swift, Google Cloud, or tape through SBT. |
| Encryption | age encryption on your server before anything is uploaded; zstd compression; SHA-256 for every file. | AES-256 (CBC) in MEB's own format; lz4, zlib or lzma compression for InnoDB. |
| Scheduling and retention | Cron-style schedules; retention per storage by count, age or GFS (daily / weekly / monthly). | No built-in scheduler; the docs suggest cron. |
| Restore | From the web UI: restore under a new database name, test-decrypt every file before dropping anything, integrity checks after each run. | Command line, with a validate command to check backup integrity. |
| Where your data goes | Straight from your server to the storage you choose. Nothing passes through a third party. | Wherever you configure it to write. |
| Notifications | Email, Telegram, Slack, Discord and HMAC-signed webhooks. | None built in. |
Choose MySQL Enterprise Backup if
- You run Oracle MySQL with an Enterprise subscription and want Oracle support for backups too.
- You need table-level restore from a physical backup, differential backups or tape via SBT.
- You are on Oracle Cloud (OCI) and want native integration.
Choose DumpCat if
- You want it free: DumpCat is open source, with no subscription.
- You run MariaDB or Percona Server as well as MySQL.
- You want schedules, retention, alerts and restores in a web UI instead of cron and runbooks.
- You want point-in-time recovery to a second or a GTID from the UI, with binlogs archived continuously.
Sources
Facts about MySQL Enterprise Backup were checked on October 18, 2026 against the sources below. Products change: if something here is out of date, please open an issue on GitHub.
- MySQL Enterprise Backup 8.4 release notes
- MySQL Enterprise Backup: compatibility with server versions
- MySQL Enterprise Backup: point-in-time recovery
- MySQL Enterprise Backup: encryption
- Oracle Store: MySQL
MySQL Enterprise Backup is a trademark of its owner. DumpCat is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with it.