SHORTLIST20
English
Englishالعربية中文日本語한국어EspañolFrançaisहिन्दी
Programming

Top 20 database command-line clients

Terminal clients with autocompletion and syntax highlighting

Updated · GitHub stars (stars)

Why these 20

Ranked by GitHub stars: how many developers bookmarked the project. Stars measure attention, not quality, so each row also shows forks, licence, the last push and the section of the community list it sits in. Tools in the same list that have no public repository (a few vendor shells) can't be ranked here.

  1. 1

    pgcli

    PostgreSQL CLI with autocompletion and syntax highlighting.

    13,421 stars 613 forkslast push 2026-10-15PythonBSD-3-Clause

    Also in: #3 PostgreSQL tools: CLIs, backups, high availability, monitoring and utilities

  2. 2

    mycli

    A Terminal Client for MySQL with AutoCompletion and Syntax Highlighting.

    11,984 stars 699 forkslast push 2026-10-20PythonBSD-3-Clause

    Also in: #3 MySQL GUI clients

  3. 3

    usql

    A universal command-line interface for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle Database, SQLite3, Microsoft SQL Server, and many other databases including NoSQL and...

    10,155 stars 408 forkslast push 2026-10-19GoMIT

  4. 4

    litecli

    CLI for SQLite Databases with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

    3,317 stars 101 forkslast push 2026-06-18PythonBSD-3-Clause

  5. 5

    iredis

    A Cli for Redis with AutoCompletion and Syntax Highlighting.

    2,763 stars 119 forkslast push 2026-09-21PythonBSD-3-Clause

  6. 6

    pspg

    PostgreSQL Pager.

    2,743 stars 91 forkslast push 2026-10-20CBSD-2-Clause

    Also in: #10 MySQL GUI clients

  7. 7

    sqlite-utils

    CLI tools for manipulating SQLite database files - inserting data, running queries, creating indexes, configuring full-text search and more.

    2,180 stars 200 forkslast push 2026-10-11PythonApache-2.0

  8. 8

    ipython-sql

    Connect to a database for issue SQL commands within IPython or IPython Notebook.

    1,795 stars 378 forkslast push 2024-07-12PythonMIT

  9. 9

    pgcenter

    Top-like admin tool for PostgreSQL.

    1,632 stars 106 forkslast push 2026-09-10GoNOASSERTION

  10. 10

    mssql-cli

    A command-line client for SQL Server with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

    1,421 stars 191 forkslast push 2024-02-26PythonBSD-3-Clause

  11. 11

    SQLLine

    Command-line shell for issuing SQL to relational databases via JDBC.

    660 stars 150 forkslast push 2023-07-07JavaBSD-3-Clause

  12. 12

    athenacli

    CLI tool for AWS Athena service that can do auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

    228 stars 37 forkslast push 2026-04-24PythonBSD-3-Clause

  13. 13

    pg_top

    Top for PostgreSQL.

    121 stars 15 forkslast push 2024-06-06CBSD-3-Clause

  14. 14

    diesel-guard

    Linter for dangerous PostgreSQL migration patterns. It works seamlessly with PostgreSQL SQL files and integrates natively with projects using Diesel and SQLx.

    120 stars 11 forkslast push 2026-10-20RustMIT

How it is measured

Every tool in the CLI section(s) of the community list mgramin/awesome-db-tools on GitHub that has a public repository, ranked by GitHub stars from the GitHub API; archived repositories are left out. Refreshed every 6 hours.

References

  1. mgramin/awesome-db-tools: CLI, GitHub community list (list text per repository licence; star counts from the GitHub API). Checked 2026-10-21 00:47 UTC.
  2. mgramin/awesome-db-tools (CLI), GitHub community list, 16 tools with a public repository.

Also in

Top 20 database GUIs and IDEs for any databaseTop 20 PostgreSQL tools: CLIs, backups, high availability, monitoring and utilitiesTop 20 MySQL GUI clientsTop 20 AI agent frameworks on GitHubTop 20 self-hosted appsTop 20 static site generatorsTop 20 open source projects in the Rust programming language