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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
7.4
PostgreSQL offers cost-effective benefits with high ROI, thanks to its open source nature and improved performance for businesses.
 

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's global community offers robust support and documentation, though more detailed guidance for non-specialists is needed.
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
 

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 is a preferred scalable database solution, effectively handling large workloads and offering seamless cloud platform scalability.
 

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 stable and reliable when properly configured, outperforming alternatives, but requires best practices for optimal performance.
 

Room For Improvement

CockroachDB requires improvements in documentation, compatibility, UI features, disaster recovery, latency optimization, integration, and cost efficiency for global deployment.
PostgreSQL needs improvements in user-friendliness, scalability, memory management, replication, integration, JSON, GUI, parallelism, and data handling.
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
Adding caching with Redis for frequently accessed data reduces database load and provides faster API responses.
Software developer at Student
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find CockroachDB affordable and reliable, with flexible pricing options appealing despite some perceiving high costs.
PostgreSQL's open-source nature offers cost-effectiveness and high ROI, attractive for enterprises, with optional paid support available.
 

Valuable Features

CockroachDB provides easy setup, fault tolerance, scalability, and security, while supporting PostgreSQL compatibility for optimal performance across regions.
PostgreSQL excels with features like robust indexing, scalability, geo-spatial support, and seamless integration, ensuring high performance and adaptability.
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
 

Categories and Ranking

CockroachDB
Ranking in Vector Databases
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (13th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (10th)
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Vector Databases
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Open Source Databases (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Vector Databases category, the mindshare of CockroachDB is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 7.2%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vector Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL7.2%
CockroachDB1.0%
Other91.8%
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.
Ece Ece - PeerSpot reviewer
Software developer at Student
Reliable transactions and rich features have powered real time collaboration and faster development
PostgreSQL fully supports ACID transactions, including atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, which are some of the best features it offers in my experience. It also supports multiple index types, such as B-tree, Gin, Gist, and BRIN, and provides JSON and JSONB support, which is used to query semi-structured data. PostgreSQL uses Multi-Version Concurrency Control, which allows multiple users to read and write simultaneously. For extensibility, PostgreSQL allows extensions such as PostGIS and pg_trgm, which are truly useful. 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. Features such as foreign keys, constraints, and triggers impact data consistency by preventing invalid data. It supports read replicas, partitioning, and horizontal scaling for scalability. PostgreSQL has been very stable in my experience, handling concurrent requests reliably while maintaining data consistency with ACID transactions and accommodating concurrent users with strong data integrity, making it mature and widely used in production systems. Using PostgreSQL with Prisma allows faster development because schema migrations are automated and type-safe queries reduce the time I spend fixing database bugs, allowing me to focus more on building features while improving collaboration between developers due to a well-defined relational schema. Migration tools keep everyone's database schema synchronized, which allows multiple developers to work on backend features without conflicts. It has a rich feature set, supporting advanced features such as window functions, common table expressions (CTEs), and full-text search, with the flexibility of supporting both JSON and relational data, meaning it can behave as both a relational database and a document database. Extensibility allows PostgreSQL to add new capabilities while maintaining a strong ecosystem that integrates easily with modern backend stacks such as Node.js, Docker, and Prisma.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Educational Organization
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
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 Enterprise46
 

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?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Baidu, Kindred, Tierion, Heroic Labs, Gorgias
1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg
Find out what your peers are saying about CockroachDB vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.