CockroachDB vs PostgreSQL

Distributed SQL has become the go-to choice for modern applications. It offers the scalability, resilience, and performance needed in today’s global landscape while also delivering the critical transactional consistency required by operational databases, whether running independently or integrated with analytical databases to implement translytical data strategies.

In this comparison, we examine PostgreSQL—one of the most widely used databases in history, but with serious limitations in horizontal scaling, multi-region availability, and sharding—alongside CockroachDB, the distributed SQL trailblazer. CockroachDB combines horizontal scaling with PostgreSQL compatibility in a familiar interface where Postgres users can become productive almost immediately.

Why leading enterprises choose CockroachDB

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

Availability

Tied to each cloud provider, AWS or GCP only

All public clouds, on prem and local

Architecture

Designed as single instance architecture

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

Scale

Scale only through bigger machines or operationally intense manual sharding

Elastic and auto scale means minimal-to-no operations

Resilience

Manual operations required for active-passive failover and complex remediation

Naturally resilient to outages with granular control at the row level

Required downtime

Database must be taken offline for upgrades and schema changes

No downtime upgrades and online schema changes

Transactional consistency

Configurable to guarantee consistency but only in a single instance

Guaranteed correct data in single data center and beyond

Multi-region

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 a single region; data residency is not an option

Data is tied to a node at the row level to optimize performance and/or regulatory compliance

Hybrid and multi-cloud deployment

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

Run anywhere on any cloud, even across regions and clouds

Migrations

Simple and fairly straightforward

Wire compatible with PostgreSQL with some required work for syntax

Freedom

Tied to a public cloud provider

Run anywhere and across multiple clouds

Pricing

Simple straightforward pricing, with complexities around active-passive systems

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

A PostgreSQL managed service…but better?

CockroachDB Serverless was architected to give developers the simplest and easiest way to start using a database AND pay for only what they consume.

Start instantly

Spin up your first cluster in just a few clicks

Pay only for what you use

Never pay for idle time, and set budget caps

Autoscaling

Automatically scale up or down to meet demand

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.