MariaDB Server began as a database server that offers drop-in replacement functionality to MySQL and has grown into being a default "MySQL" in many Linux distributions. MariaDB Server is built by some of the original authors of MySQL, with assistance from the broader community of free and open source software developers. In addition to the core functionality of MySQL, MariaDB Server offers a rich set of feature enhancements including alternate storage engines, advanced server optimizations, and other features. MariaDB Server is feature enhanced, community developed and backward compatible with MySQL. MariaDB Server ships in all major Linux distributions and is backed by the MariaDB Foundation.

MariaDB offers a fully synchronous replication solution, MariaDB Galera Cluster, an intelligent proxy called MariaDB MaxScale, and a data analytics solution MariaDB ColumnStore. MariaDB Server also has LGPL client libraries for C, Java and ODBC.