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CrateDB vs PostgreSQL comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

CrateDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
20th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
128
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of CrateDB is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 12.0%, down from 16.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL12.0%
CrateDB1.1%
Other86.9%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

FC
product owner at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Data platform has delivered real-time casino gameplay insights but still needs broader expertise
The best features CrateDB offers in my experience include many functionalities that allow you to purge data, maintain data, keep the database clean and essentially updated. CrateDB also allows us to store many records, and I think the performance is very strong compared to other databases or technologies. CrateDB's performance stood out for me as it allowed me to query results in less than seconds, which was optimal and enabled real-time analytics. I found it to be a very distributed SQL engine, which was beneficial considering our specific requirements. It supports multi-model and flexible schemas for structured and semi-structured data, JSON, time series for loads, and BLOBs, along with integrated performance improvements and faster ingestion than what I recall from other databases, plus better query optimizations. CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day. Positively, we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day, and we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years."
"CrateDB positively impacted my organization by reducing the time needed for processes, and its impressive scalability made it easy to start with one server and then horizontally scale to multiple nodes to retrieve data, which helped my company gain more customers."
"CrateDB fit into my project very well as it was an excellent database that allowed me to query analyses I did not think I would be able to perform."
"The solution provides complete support in terms of the SQL dialect and behaves nicely when it comes to transactions."
"PostgreSQL is very powerful, easy to manage, and has many features."
"PostgreSQL's feature set was excellent for our needs, and we didn't want an expensive (meaning hardware utilization) RDBMS."
"The main value is that it is open source, which means it is free. Our organization has the initiative to go to open source to cut down on cost. Oracle costs us $6 million a year right now, which is killing us, and Postgres costs nothing. So, there is a big push to go to Postgres."
"It is a pretty comprehensive database system. Its performance is good, and it does what it is supposed to do. It also integrates very well."
"For us, the ROI was almost immediate."
"For its open source model and very good documentation, it is very easy to optimize queries within bigger databases (100GB), and because it is free, it lowers the price of our solution so we can address smaller customers."
"It is a superb database."
 

Cons

"CrateDB was good regarding scalability, though not excellent."
"One area for improvement in CrateDB could be the command line interface, as sometimes it was not very easy to understand."
"CrateDB can be improved as it is not very popular, which means there are not many people dedicated or experienced with this particular technology, making it less usable or suitable for many companies."
"The price could be better."
"PostgreSQL is pretty slow when dealing with queries like COUNT(*) and many of the queries like 'INSERT IGNORE', which inserts if a row doesn't exist, and 'REPLACE' which replaces the current row."
"There are several features I would like to improve that aren't working as expected."
"I find, sometimes, that it is too restrictive in cross-table/view constraints."
"Replication is not yet as well implemented as in MySQL."
"We don't have any use cases where we would use it in a large application as we do with Oracle."
"They need to improve the user experience of the management."
"The user interface could be a bit better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We are using the free version of PostgreSQL."
"It is an open-source platform."
"The licensing model is good."
"It is free. In terms of operating costs, it basically needs the same platform on which Oracle runs."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
"Affordable solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business58
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise49
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrateDB?
CrateDB was free when I used it, so there was no pricing associated with it, as we used the free version.
What needs improvement with CrateDB?
I wanted to use CrateDB for visualization as well, but it did not provide what I needed, so we had to opt for Grafana for the visualization instead. Regarding needed improvements, I was quite able ...
What is your primary use case for CrateDB?
I used CrateDB for a one-off project from April to August in 2025. My main use case was a digital twin project designed to create a FIWARE-based application with a focus on optimizing the data mana...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
I am not directly involved in the licensing or procurement decisions, so I cannot comment in detail on the price. From an engineering perspective, PostgreSQL is cost-efficient because it is open so...
What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?
While improving reliability, I have noticed that the limitations in PostgreSQL can be complex. For large-scale deployments, configuration, performance tuning, and related tasks can be complex and i...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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Find out what your peers are saying about CrateDB vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.