Wix offers a variety of data management solutions to accommodate common user needs. This includes support for internal databases hosted directly on Wix as well as for external databases hosted outside the Wix ecosystem.
This article explains the internal database capabilities Wix provides, and the available options for working with external databases.
You can work with Wix's data management solutions in the following IDEs:
Wix's built-in data management solution is the Wix Content Management System (CMS). CMS data collections are document-oriented databases, optimized to store and retrieve websites’ content. They are globally replicated and have native support for PII encryption and GDPR. They run on secure, shared infrastructure, and are fully managed by Wix.
CMS data collections can be managed via the Wix Data APIs, and used (with or without datasets) to populate Wix UI elements like repeaters and tables.
For more information about using Wix Data to work with the CMS on a Wix site, see Working with Wix Data.
While CMS collections cover a wide range of use cases for content-driven websites and applications, some projects may have specific requirements that can't be addressed by the integrated database solution.
To address such cases, Wix allows users to connect an external database to Wix sites using an external database adaptor. Once the connection is set up, users can interact with these databases and use them to populate site elements as though they were Wix CMS collections.
For more information about connecting to external databases, see Integrating External Databases with Your Wix Site.
If you haven't already chosen a database engine, there's a lot of material on the internet about database comparisons and benchmarks that can help you decide.
We suggest taking the following into account:
Note: Wix created out-of-the-box container image adaptors for a number of databases that can run on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Using these out of the box adaptors can make integration with the supported databases simpler. See which databases are supported with an out-of-the-box adaptor.