-- MariaDB 10.2.7 CREATE TABLE `jsontst`( `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `str` JSON, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=Aria CHARSET=latin1; SHOW CREATE TABLE `jsontst`; /* returns CREATE TABLE `jsontst2` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `str` text DEFAULT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=Aria DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 PAGE_CHECKSUM=1 */ readings: https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-9144 https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=86875 As you see except for JSON in MariaDB just being a synonym of TEXT there are two more significant differences 1) length: in MySQL JSON has the lenght of a LONGTEXT - in MariaDB it is a (plain) TEXT 2) encoding: in MySQL the utf8mb4 character set is enforced for JSON data - in MariaDB you may specify any character set. I think in particular 2nd point could cause problems (unicode garbling) when loading a dump with JSON data from MySQL. Basically because latin1 is still default character set in MariaDB. Are you aware of the 2 differences? I think the major reason for introducing JSON in MariaDB is compability concerns with MySQL. But the 2 points here are IMO incompabilites that could have been avoided?