Cloudflare announced it has acquired Outerbase in an effort to boost its database services, building on a collaboration between the two companies that began last year.

Cloudflare is one of the leading CDN providers, and provides its customers with a host of AI, cybersecurity, and internet services. The company points out the challenges that many companies face properly utilizing databases.

Databases are key to building almost any production application: you need to persist state for your users (or agents), be able to query it from a number of different clients, and you want it to be fast. But databases aren’t always easy to use: designing a good schema, writing performant queries, creating indexes, and optimizing your access patterns tends to require a lot of experience. Add that to exposing your data through easy-to-grok APIs that make the ‘right’ way to do things obvious, a great developer experience (from dashboard to CLI), and well… there’s a lot of work involved.

This is where Outbase comes in, with the company making significant improvements to how databases “are viewed edited, and visualized.” The company set out with the goal of making “data accessible to everyone, no matter their skill level.”

Outerbase became a platform that helps you manage data in a way that feels natural. You can browse tables, edit rows, and run queries without having to deal with memorizing SQL structure. Even if you do know SQL, you can use Outerbase to dive in deeper and share your knowledge with your team. We also added visualization features so entire teams, both technical and not, could see what’s happening with their data at a glance. Then, with the growth of AI, we realized we could use it to handle many of the more complicated tasks.

One of our more exciting offerings is Starbase, a SQLite-compatible database built on top of Cloudflare’s Durable Objects. Our goal was never to simply wrap a legacy system in a shiny interface; we wanted to make it so easy to get started from day one with nothing, and Cloudflare’s Durable Objects gave us a way to easily manage and spin up databases for anyone who needed one. On top of them, we provided automatic REST APIs, row-level security, WebSocket support for streaming queries, and much more.

After collaborating with each other since last year, the two companies decided that joining forces made the most sense. The two companies will integrate Outbase’s core features into Cloudflare before Outbase shuts down on October 15, 2025. The companies say self-hosting will remain an option for those that want it.

You will still be able to self-host Outerbase if you prefer, and we’ll provide guidance on how to do that within your own Cloudflare account. Our main goal will be to ensure that the best parts of Outerbase become part of the Cloudflare developer experience, so you no longer have to make a choice (it’ll be obvious!).

The addition of Outerbase will be a boon for Cloudflare’s services, lowering the barrier to entry for one of the key elements that modern platforms are built on.