What is EDB Postgres?
EDB, formerly EnterpriseDB, is a company that has contributed to the PostgreSQL project for a long time and sells commercial products built on it. The name covers two different things, and confusing them is the usual starting point.
Community PostgreSQL with EDB support is the ordinary open-source database, with a commercial support contract behind it. Nothing about the database changes.
EDB Postgres Advanced Server is a distinct product: PostgreSQL extended with capabilities EDB develops and licenses commercially. It is compatible with PostgreSQL, and it is not the same software.
The question this page exists to answer is which of those two you actually need, because most organizations that ask about EDB need the first and are being quoted the second.
What Advanced Server adds
The headline capability is Oracle compatibility. Advanced Server understands a large part of Oracle's PL/SQL dialect, along with its packages and data dictionary conventions. That matters for exactly one situation, and it is a big one: an organization with years of PL/SQL business logic that wants off Oracle without rewriting all of it first.
Around that sit enterprise features: additional security controls, auditing, and tooling for migration and high availability. Useful, and mostly things a well-run PostgreSQL estate solves in other ways.
When Advanced Server earns its license
You are migrating off Oracle and the stored procedures are the obstacle. This is the case it was built for. If you have tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL, compatibility turns a rewrite into a migration, and the license cost has to be compared with the cost of that rewrite rather than with the cost of free PostgreSQL.
A procurement process requires a vendor. Some organizations cannot adopt software without a company on the other side of a contract. That is a legitimate constraint and Advanced Server satisfies it.
You need a specific feature it has and community PostgreSQL does not. Rare, and worth checking carefully, because the list is shorter than it was five years ago.
When plain PostgreSQL is the answer
Most of the time, honestly.
Community PostgreSQL is not a limited edition of a commercial product. It is the database, developed in the open, with the extension ecosystem covering most of what an enterprise deployment needs. Teams starting fresh, without Oracle legacy, almost never encounter a wall that Advanced Server would have prevented.
The commercial decision worth separating: you can buy support for community PostgreSQL without buying Advanced Server. Wanting someone accountable at three in the morning is not the same as needing Oracle compatibility, and the two get bundled in conversation more often than they should.
The lock-in question, asked in both directions
Advanced Server is compatible with PostgreSQL, so applications written against it generally work. Applications using its Oracle-compatible features are a different matter: those are the parts community PostgreSQL does not have, which is the point of paying for them and also the shape of the commitment.
This is not an argument against it. It is an argument for knowing which you are choosing, because a migration undertaken to escape one vendor's dialect that lands on another vendor's dialect has solved a smaller problem than it appears to.
What running either one involves
The operational work is the same for both, and it is the same list PostgreSQL always demands: backups that have been restored, failover that has been rehearsed, connection pooling sized to the process-per-connection model, autovacuum keeping up with your write pattern, and minor releases applied on the project's quarterly cadence. Community PostgreSQL supports each major version for five years.
A license does not operate a database. It gives you someone to call, which is worth having and is a different thing.
Where VSHN fits
VSHN is an official EDB partner in Switzerland and has operated PostgreSQL in production since 2014, on Swiss cloud infrastructure from CHF 80 per month with up to 99.99% SLA. That means we can run either: community PostgreSQL where that is the right answer, EDB Postgres Advanced Server where the Oracle estate makes it the right answer.
The useful first conversation is which of those your situation actually calls for, and we have no reason to push the more expensive one when it is not. If you are weighing options across providers, our hosting comparison sets them side by side.