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CrateDB 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

CrateDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
17th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
125
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of CrateDB is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 14.3%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
PostgreSQL14.3%
CrateDB0.9%
Other84.8%
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.
AC
Senior Assosiate Consultant at Applied Materials
Real-time data capture optimizes database performance but Views create problems
One of the most valuable features is real-time data capture; it optimizes database performance. I think using real-time data capture reduces job running time and the amount of data sent at once with batch loads. Replicating the same data daily isn't optimal, so real-time reception improves application performance and reduces latency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."
"The product is easy to use and works fast for relational databases."
"Postgres is rock solid when deployed according to best practices as documented by the PostgreSQL community. When it's installed correctly, PostgreSQL is an enterprise-grade solution."
"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."
"It is very useful for both structured and unstructured data. You can store unstructured and structured data in PostgreSQL. It is easy to use. You can easily manage things through PostgreSQL Admin. It is cost-effective. Its on-premise version is free. It is agnostic of on-premise or cloud. You can install it on the cloud or on-premises. It is available with all clouds, and you can also install it on desktop or Windows Servers."
"It is easy to install and easy to manage. There is no license on it, so it is free. There is high compatibility with Oracle, and there are many tools for the migration of data from Oracle to Postgre."
"Scalable, stable, and easy to manage database system, with a straightforward installation."
"What I like is that it's quite powerful in terms of performance."
"The system can perform faster analysis by providing it with a lot of memory. Speed is crucial for analytics. Currently, the main reason we haven't adopted Elasticsearch is that we lack the necessary expertise to manage it."
 

Cons

"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."
"PostgreSQL doesn't have a feature for temporal SQL, which is useful for gathering versions of data. This feature should be included in PostgreSQL. This feature is available in MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle Database, and DB2."
"A better graphic user-interface would be nice to see."
"It still needs to be more mature and have some backup feature. We are normally dealing with Oracle's data, and we have very strong online tools to back up the data and do other things. PostgreSQL still needs to do more in this area as well as in the high availability area. There are many external tools that you can use for PostgreSQL's high availability, but there is no embedded tool within PostgreSQL for high availability. It could have a feature similar to Oracle for working on a distributed system. It can have some scripts to improve the monitoring and some tools to do performance analysis. We have a workaround for most of such requirements except for the support for a distributed system, which is very difficult to have. This area should be included in the core of the database itself."
"It would be good to have machine learning functionality in this solution, similar to Microsoft SQL Server and other solutions. Machine learning capability for a basic level or a common user would be useful. It can also have good reporting capabilities."
"It could be improved by using parallelization. You want basically, distributed computing."
"PostgreSQL’s performance could be improved."
"PostgreSQL could improve by providing a geographical solution for tracking trucks and people in the field. They might already have features similar to this and I have not found them. I haven't done research about this topic."
"The scalability is limited."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is an open-source platform."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
"The tool is cheaply priced compared to other RDBMS providers in the market."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"It could be much cheaper. If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift. If you want other databases, you can add them, but PostgreSQL is the basis of everything. It's a question of money, that's it."
"We do not pay for licensing."
"It is open-source. If you use it on-premise, it is free. It also has enterprise or commercial versions. If you go for the cloud version, there will be a cost, but it is lower than Oracle or Microsoft."
"The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise46
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrateDB?
We were happy with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of CrateDB, and I do not have any complaints. Everything was great.
What needs improvement with CrateDB?
One area for improvement in CrateDB could be the command line interface, as sometimes it was not very easy to understand. However, if you are technically adept, it was not a tough challenge; it was...
What is your primary use case for CrateDB?
At my previous company, which was a security analytics tool, my main use case for CrateDB was to ingest any kind of logs from email, applications, firewalls, DNS, Microsoft, and other technology to...
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

Information Not Available
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 CrateDB vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.