# Citus

9 Hacker News commenters recommended Citus and 5 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open-source Postgres extension for sharding and scaling out across nodes, praised for maturity and a strong query engine. Critics say one coordinator node fans out requests and that it is not fully feature-complete.

## Why people recommend it

- Scales out through sharding and query routers (3 comments): "So with Citus you can absolutely have as many query routers (coordinators if you wish) as you want." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48487234)) "get sharding by schema for free, so you have both isolation and more or less infinite growth" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904263)) "Shard rebalancing is fully built-into Citus as a UDF" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660217))
- Proven and mature for critical workloads (2 comments): "It is a brilliant piece of technology that supported mission critical workloads" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668312)) "Feature-full, proven, mature, boring." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667063))
- Advanced query engine for large aggregations (2 comments): "With extensions (DuckDB or Citus) you can do large aggregations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938531)) "Citus still wins because of its advanced query engine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477239))

## What people warn about

- One coordinator node fans out requests (2 comments): "with Citus, for most use cases, you can only have one co-ordinator node which fans out requests" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506310)) "its not feature-full. like schema changes locking, coordinator node.." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668007))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [pgvector](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgvector.md): 55 recommend
- [PostGIS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgis.md): 20 recommend
- [pg_lake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-lake.md): 18 recommend
- [ParadeDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paradedb.md): 13 recommend
- [pg_textsearch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-textsearch.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Citus", https://hackerapproved.com/p/citus/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).