Tabloy vs Navicat
A $699 tool that does everything — including things you'll never use
Navicat has been around since 2001. In enterprise IT departments, it's often the default purchase because it has every feature anyone could ever ask for — data synchronization, scheduling, modeling, team collaboration, report generation. It's the SAP of database clients. And like SAP, you're probably only using 20% of what you're paying for.
What Navicat does well
Feature completeness
Data transfer between databases, scheduled backups, model design, query building with a visual editor — Navicat has features that most tools don't even attempt. If your job involves migrating data between engines regularly, these matter.
25 years of stability
Navicat rarely crashes. It handles edge cases that newer tools haven't encountered yet. That kind of reliability is earned, not engineered.
Why we built Tabloy differently
The price
Navicat Premium costs $699 (perpetual) or $289/year. Per seat. That's more than many developers spend on all their tools combined. Tabloy is free for personal use and $5/month for commercial use. Do the math on a team of five.
The interface hasn't kept up
Navicat's UI is functional but dated. Tiny icons, cramped layouts, dialogs inside dialogs. It looks like it was designed for 1024x768 screens and never fully reimagined for modern displays. Tabloy was designed in 2025 for how developers work today.
Your passwords stay on your machine
Navicat Cloud stores connection details on their servers. Tabloy keeps everything local — passwords in your OS keychain, connections on disk. We can't see your credentials because we never have them.
Side by side
| Tabloy | Navicat | |
|---|---|---|
| SQL editor | ✓ | ✓ |
| PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite | ✓ | ✓ |
| MongoDB | ✓ | Yes (Premium) |
| Redis | ✓ | Yes (Premium) |
| ER diagrams | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI query generation | ✓ | — |
| Charts | ✓ | ✓ |
| Data transfer / sync | — | ✓ |
| Cloud collaboration | — | ✓ |
| Scheduled backups | — | ✓ |
| Price (individual) | Free / $5 mo | $289/year |
| Passwords in OS keychain | ✓ | — |
The bottom line
If your IT department already has Navicat licenses and you need enterprise features like data sync and team collaboration, use what's there. But if you're choosing your own tools and spending your own money, Tabloy covers the daily workflow — connecting, querying, editing, visualizing — at a fraction of the cost.
No account needed. No feature limits. Just download and connect.
Try Tabloy Free