Most Flutter apps pick a local database once and never look at it again. That is fine until the package you picked quietly stops shipping releases.

We checked the packages people actually shortlist on pub.dev and their GitHub repositories on 2 October 2026. Here is when each one last shipped a stable release:

Package Latest stable Released Status
hive 2.2.3 June 2022 Stalled, not marked discontinued
isar 3.1.0+1 April 2023 Stalled, not marked discontinued
realm 20.2.0 September 2025 Deprecated by MongoDB
isar_community 3.3.2 March 2026 Active, bug-fix focused
objectbox 5.3.2 May 2026 Active, commercial vendor
isar_plus 1.3.9 August 2026 Active, single maintainer
sqflite 2.4.4 September 2026 Maintained, slow-moving
hive_ce 2.20.1 September 2026 Active community fork
drift 2.35.1 September 2026 Active

Stalled is not the same as broken

Neither hive nor isar carries pub.dev's discontinued flag, and neither repository is archived. An app built on Hive 2.2.3 in 2022 still opens its boxes today.

The risk is not that your app stops working tomorrow. It is that the package stops keeping up with everything around it:

  • a new Dart version
  • an analyzer upgrade that breaks an old code generator
  • a new iOS privacy requirement
  • an Android Gradle change

When one of those breaks a stalled package, nobody upstream is going to fix it for you. Nobody can tell you which release will be the one.

Realm is a different case. MongoDB announced the deprecation of the Realm SDKs and Atlas Device Sync in September 2024, and version 20.0.0 removed sync. If your app depends on Realm sync, you are already on borrowed time.

A trap in the Hive README

Hive's own README still points readers to Isar if they need queries, multi-isolate support or relations. That advice made sense in 2022. In 2026 it sends you from one stalled project to another. The Isar README, for its part, says plainly that its v4 line is not ready for production and tells production users to stay on version 3.

Check your own project in two minutes

You don't need anyone's table to do this. In your project:

flutter pub outdated

Then open the pub.dev page of each storage package you depend on and look at two things:

  1. The date of the latest stable version, not the latest prerelease.
  2. The repository's recent commits, especially whether issues about new Dart or Flutter versions get answered.

A package with a 2022 stable release and a 2023 prerelease is telling you something.

What to do about it

Starting a new project? Pick from the active rows. Roughly:

  • Key-value storage with little ceremony: hive_ce
  • Relational data, SQL, type-safe queries and migrations: drift
  • Plain SQLite access: sqflite

Already on a stalled package? The cheapest exits stay inside the same family:

  • hive to hive_ce: low effort. It keeps the Hive v2 API.
  • isar to isar_community: low to medium effort. It is a fork of the v3 line, so your Isar code keeps its API. Note that web is not in its platform list. 
# pubspec.yaml: the hive_ce route dependencies: hive_ce: ^2.20.1

Moving to a different engine (for example isar to drift) is a real rewrite of your data layer, so plan it as a project, not a dependency bump.

The takeaway

Put "last stable release" on the checklist you use when you choose a dependency, and look again once a year. Picking a maintained package costs nothing on day one. Migrating off an abandoned one after it breaks costs a sprint.

Further reading: the full comparison, with features, a decision tree and migration paths, is on our blog: Hive vs Isar vs SQLite: choosing a Flutter local database in 2026.

Which local database are you using in production right now, and has it bitten you yet?