CockroachDB vs Google Spanner

If you like Spanner, you’ll love CockroachDB. Learn more about the difference between them.

Transactions

CockroachDB was architected for complex, high performant distributed transactions with serializable isolation as the default.

Geo Partitioning

Supports geo-partitioning with zone configurations for data locality, compliance, and low latency.

Multi-Region

Synchronous replication across regions, cloud providers, on-premises, or hybrid with Raft consensus for fault tolerance and strong consistency.

CockroachDB and Spanner employ a similar distributed architecture; however, with CockroachDB you are free to deploy wherever and however you like.

Availability

GCP Only

All public clouds, on-prem and local

Architecture

Architected to span globally distributed data centers, yet still valuable in a single data center

Architected to resiliently span globally distributed data centers, while still being valuable in a single data center

Distributed transactions

Limited ability to optimize latency concerns for multi-region writes

Intelligent replication uses RAFT to place data and efficiently utilize available storage and compute resources

Multi-region writes

Limited ability to optimize latency concerns for multi-region writes

Advances in parallel commits and transaction pipelining reduce broad geographic transaction latencies

Data residency

Entire database lives in each region with no control at row level for survival/latency/compliance goals for data

Data is tied to a node at the row level to optimize performance and/or comply with data regulations

Hybrid and multi-cloud deployment

Tied to GCP instances only, no options for multi and/or hybrid cloud

Run anywhere on any cloud and even across regions and clouds

Pricing

A la carte pricing for networking, storage and per-instance with limited availability

Simple, straightforward pricing, plus the ability to tie data to a location to avoid egress costs

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Databases and platform freedom

CockroachDB is architected to give you the freedom to deploy your database anywhere and on any cloud. You can use the best solution and still gain value from any cloud provider

Freedom from Lock-In

Make smart use of your existing resources with CockroachDB’s hybrid-cloud capabilities. AWS Aurora won’t let you deploy in a hybrid environment

Freedom of Choice

Pick any (or multiple) providers and run self-deployed or as-a-service. Because no one should have to be locked into a single provider

Freedom to Grow

Effortlessly scale and take control of your workloads. Avoid the significant egress costs often seen when moving data with AWS Aurora

Architected to deliver the resilience modern business demands

Modern challenges for digital retail.

Deliver flawless customer experiences built on accurate, always available user data.

Payments systems

When it comes to capturing payments at scale, data consistency and high availability are priceless.

Inventory management

Sell to zero (but not beyond) with always-accurate stock counts, even when shoppers have a change of cart.