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CockroachDB vs PostgreSQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
CockroachDB's serverless model provides cost-effective, versatile cloud solutions, offering significant savings and operational advantages over separate environments.
Sentiment score
7.0
PostgreSQL's open-source nature offers cost savings, quick ROI, and improved performance, beneficial for both startups and growing enterprises.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.0
CockroachDB customer service is mixed; technical support quality varies, with users praising the AI chatbot, but responsiveness needs improvement.
Sentiment score
6.7
PostgreSQL support is community-driven, with robust third-party services and comprehensive documentation, but lacks centralized official support.
The issue was resolved efficiently.
Manager, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
If PostgreSQL is hosted on cloud services such as Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL, the support is handled by the cloud provider, who provides automated backups, monitoring, infrastructure management, and technical support tickets.
Software developer at Student
This is definitely giving positive results on product efficiency and product cost.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
CockroachDB excels in scalability and resource management, praised for seamless scaling from small to large, supporting diverse needs efficiently.
Sentiment score
7.5
PostgreSQL effectively manages scalability with high transaction volumes, excelling in cloud environments and benefiting from cost-effective open-source expansion.
Now, we are doing the same level of transactions in PostgreSQL, around 100,000 transactions, and we are getting good throughput with no latency.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
CockroachDB is stable overall, highly rated for reliability but faces challenges with protocol issues and large, complex workloads.
Sentiment score
8.0
PostgreSQL is praised for stability and reliability, outperforming MySQL and often preferred over Oracle for dependable performance.
I have never seen any performance issue in PostgreSQL.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Room For Improvement

CockroachDB requires improvements in documentation, compatibility, UI features, disaster recovery, latency optimization, integration, and cost efficiency for global deployment.
Users want improved PostgreSQL user-friendliness, query optimization, BI integration, scalability, multi-master replication, and enhanced documentation.
For multi-region deployment, CockroachDB requires at least three plus replicas across data centers to achieve strong consistency across regions, which increases infrastructure costs including compute, storage, and networking.
Manager, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Query optimization improves slow queries by using proper indexes, avoiding unnecessary joins, and using EXPLAIN ANALYZE to inspect query plans.
Software developer at Student
If I need to increase the dimension to 3,000 or 5,000, that option should be available.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find CockroachDB affordable and reliable, with flexible pricing options appealing despite some perceiving high costs.
PostgreSQL is a cost-effective, open-source database offering flexibility, scalability, and optional support, ideal for businesses with budget constraints.
Even with doing 100,000 transactions right now within PostgreSQL, we are happy with PostgreSQL and not seeing that it is expensive or going out of budget.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Valuable Features

CockroachDB provides easy setup, fault tolerance, scalability, and security, while supporting PostgreSQL compatibility for optimal performance across regions.
PostgreSQL offers robust geospatial support, extensibility, performance, scalability, and diverse features, making it a highly valued open-source database.
CockroachDB's geo-distribution feature is superior to traditional databases.
Manager, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
PostgreSQL improves reliability, performance, and scalability in production. Since it is ACID compliant, it ensures that database transactions are safe and consistent, preventing partial data updates, maintaining data integrity, and allowing multiple users to read or write data simultaneously using MVCC.
Software developer at Student
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL.
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
 

Categories and Ranking

CockroachDB
Ranking in Vector Databases
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (15th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (11th)
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Vector Databases
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
127
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of CockroachDB is 1.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 7.9%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL7.9%
CockroachDB1.6%
Other90.5%
Vector Databases
 

Featured Reviews

SC
Manager, Software Engineering at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Provides developer-friendly environment with robust security and cost-efficiency
The platform should provide a UI feature where users have the ability to manage it. The CockroachDB platform should have a chatbot where users can inquire about pricing or seek solutions for queries, rather than relying on email support. The current UI only provides SQL playground, which is technical. There should be a UI playground where users with limited technical knowledge can run and update queries, similar to phpMyAdmin or Adminer. Latency optimization could be improved for globally distributed applications, particularly in query routing. For multi-region deployment, CockroachDB requires at least three plus replicas across data centers to achieve strong consistency across regions, which increases infrastructure costs including compute, storage, and networking. The disadvantages include cost-efficiency with multi-region deployment and schema migration speed, which should be faster compared to other drivers. The query optimizer should handle complex queries better through the UI interface.
Shobhit Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Educational Organization
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise47
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with CockroachDB?
The platform should provide a UI feature where users have the ability to manage it. The CockroachDB platform should have a chatbot where users can inquire about pricing or seek solutions for querie...
What is your primary use case for CockroachDB?
We have been using CockroachDB for the last two years. From 2023, we started working on a product similar to Google Capture. We decided to work with CockroachDB with Hasura. Hasura is a UI for the ...
What advice do you have for others considering CockroachDB?
The tech support deserves a rating of nine out of ten. My overall rating for CockroachDB is 8 out of 10.
How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
I purchased from the marketplace, so licensing and pricing cost is acceptable. To be honest, there is a separate team who handles the cost of licensing everything. I have admin access on Azure and ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about CockroachDB vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.