The answer is impossible to answer until you tell us more about your needs. Better choice considering what?

In general, untill you have terabytes of data or a significant amount of traffic (operations per second) database choice does not matter and you should be using cheaper option, where the cost should be assessed as a derivative of price of hosting, cost per operation, cost to deliver (how familiar you are with it).

When you have significant amount of data or traffic - only then you should worry about database kind or language. Until then this could be a premature optimization.

We have both MySQL and PostgreSQL in our production environment. Postgres is way nicer as a user of the DB. I created a document months ago outlining a dozen different things that Postgres does that MySQL either doesn’t do or does worse. I can’t speak to managing the DB as I don’t have experience with that.

You aren’t exposing the database right?

I’d choose which ever one is not PostgreSQL.

Postgres also had the advantage of great support for JSON elements, which gives you the power of a no-sql system like mongo in the package. A major selling point if your schema is evolving.

As someone that admins hundreds of MySQL at work, I’d go with PostgreSQL.

Postgres is a more robust and better designed and developed product, also it’s not owned by fucking Oracle.

As somebody who just watched a team implement MySQL for an app that only supported Postgres, I’d go with Postgres.

I never want to use MySQL again. Postgres or SQLite for relational databases.

I’d vote for MariaDB or Postgres

Another vote for Postgres, MySQL kind of blows.

Postgres. It’s more strict by default, which leads to a lot fewer surprises.

Here’s my rule of thumb:

1. SQLite - if it’s enough
2. Postgres
3. MariaDB - if you don’t care about your data and just want the thing to work
4. MySQL - if you sold your soul to Oracle, but still can’t afford their license fee

Absolutely depends on what do you want it for and what resources can you apply on it (learning, set-up, etc).

That said, MySQL is owned by Oracle. The more-or-less blessed alternative IIRC is MariaDB.

Choosing is not so much about whether it’s internet facing or not. From the programmer’s perspective and an administrator’s perspective there are pros and cons to both. As someone looking to self-host, if you want to run a service that works with either, I would make the choice based on what seems the most supported, or which one you feel the most comfortable looking up and performing administrative tasks on. I tend to use postgresql more just because I have more experience with it and can recommend it if that’s what you need, but mysql can be just as good or better in many circumstances. Pick whichever one looks easier to you.

The only reason I wouldn’t go with Postgres is if I planned to do other things on the same machine. MariaDB/MySQL has been around forever. You may find something that requires it — Wordpress¹, for example, requires MariaDB (or MySQL but use MariaDB) and doesn’t support Postgres.

Also, there’s solutions like Docker containers if you are running multiple things on the same server. But if you’re just learning and putting one thing on a Raspberry Pi as a project or whatever, you don’t need to learn Docker yet.

¹ I’m not recommending Wordpress. It’s ancient and has security issues all the time. But over 40% of sites on the Net still use it in some form. (I mean Wordpress.org, the open source project. The Wordpress company seems to be having some “crazy CEO” drama at the moment.)

PostgreSQL is the more feature rich, but if you don’t care about all those features like saving and searching in json structures, Geo data structures and a to of other stuff because you have a simple APO then MySQL is good enough, maybe even SQLite.