With the increasing popularity of XML data and a great need for a database management system able to store, retrieve and manipulate XML-based data in an efficient manner, database research communities and software industries have tried to respond to this requirement. XML-enabled database and native XML database are two approaches that have been proposed to address this challenge. These two approaches are a legacy database systems which are extended to store, retrieve and manipulate XML-based data. The major objective of this paper is to explore and compare between the two approaches and reach to some criteria to have a suitable guideline to select the best approach in each circumstance. In general, native XML database systems have more ability in comparison with XML-enabled database system for managing XML-based data