A comparison of the two Distributed SQL leaders

CockroachDB vs. Google Spanner

If you like Spanner—and even if you don't—you’ll love CockroachDB.

CockroachDB is a cloud-agnostic, AI-native, PostgreSQL-compatible data platform built for modern applications and used by industry-leading innovators worldwide to deliver unmatched uptime, scale, and compliance.

In this comparison, we examine CockroachDB alongside Google Spanner, which until mid-2026 was a cloud-only offering. Along with CockroachDB, Spanner helped pioneer distributed SQL, but Spanner faces serious challenges with aggressive vendor lock-in; rigid deployment constraints; complex cross-region egress pricing; and a lack of traditional database features like stored procedures, triggers, and native row-level geo-partitioning compliance.

Why choose CockroachDB over Spanner?

Multiple clouds

CockroachDB can run anywhere, on any cloud, and even across multiple clouds and the hybrid cloud

Global transactions

CockroachDB has features like parallel commits and pipelining to optimize globally distributed transactions

Multi-region simplicity

CockroachDB provides simple DDL that allows you to define where data will live across multiple regions

Compare side-by-side

Features

Availability

All public clouds, on-prem and local

GCP Only

Architecture

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

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

Distributed transactions

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

Limited ability to optimize latency concerns for multi-region writes

Multi-region writes

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

Limited ability to optimize latency concerns for multi-region writes

Data residency

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

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

Hybrid and multi-cloud deployment

Run anywhere on any cloud and even across regions and clouds

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

Pricing

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

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

Download the comparison

Related resources

CockroachDB vs. Amazon Aurora: Comparing Distributed Relational Databases

Watch the webinar