How to: Alternatives
Why another database schema migration tool? Dbmate was inspired by many other tools, primarily [Active Record Migrations](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_migrations.html), with the goals of being trivial to configure, and language & framework independent. Here is a comparison between dbmate and other popular migration tools.

|                                                              | [dbmate](https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate) | [goose](https://github.com/pressly/goose) | [sql-migrate](https://github.com/rubenv/sql-migrate) | [golang-migrate](https://github.com/golang-migrate/migrate) | [activerecord](http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_migrations.html) | [sequelize](http://docs.sequelizejs.com/manual/tutorial/migrations.html) | [flyway](https://flywaydb.org/) | [sqitch](https://sqitch.org/) |
| ------------------------------------------------------------ | :------------------------------------------: | :---------------------------------------: | :--------------------------------------------------: | :---------------------------------------------------------: | :-------------------------------------------------------------------------: | :----------------------------------------------------------------------: | :-----------------------------: | :---------------------------: |
| **Features**                                                 |
| Plain SQL migration files                                    |              :white_check_mark:              |            :white_check_mark:             |                  :white_check_mark:                  |                     :white_check_mark:                      |                                                                             |                                                                          |       :white_check_mark:        |      :white_check_mark:       |
| Support for creating and dropping databases                  |              :white_check_mark:              |                                           |                                                      |                                                             |                             :white_check_mark:                              |                                                                          |                                 |
| Support for saving schema dump files                         |              :white_check_mark:              |                                           |                                                      |                                                             |                             :white_check_mark:                              |                                                                          |                                 |
| Timestamp-versioned migration files                          |              :white_check_mark:              |            :white_check_mark:             |                                                      |                     :white_check_mark:                      |                             :white_check_mark:                              |                            :white_check_mark:                            |                                 |
| Custom schema migrations table                               |              :white_check_mark:              |                                           |                  :white_check_mark:                  |                                                             |                                                                             |                            :white_check_mark:                            |       :white_check_mark:        |
| Ability to wait for database to become ready                 |              :white_check_mark:              |                                           |                                                      |                                                             |                                                                             |                                                                          |                                 |
| Database connection string loaded from environment variables |              :white_check_mark:              |                                           |                                                      |                                                             |                                                                             |                                                                          |       :white_check_mark:        |
| Automatically load .env file                                 |              :white_check_mark:              |                                           |                                                      |                                                             |                                                                             |