# CockroachDB

19 Hacker News commenters recommended CockroachDB and 11 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for scaling, fault tolerance and Postgres compatibility. Critics mainly cite the move from Apache to a commercial license and extra work porting queries.

## Why people recommend it

- Fault tolerance and failover built in (2 comments): "Building reliability and failover is actually a fun engineering problem, use CockroachDB and RustFS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713623)) "they all give you fault tolerance for free without much involvement from your side" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47977355))
- Postgres-compatible, horizontally scalable (2 comments): "They are horizontally scalable, support postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49395602)) "Yugabyte or CockroachDB for Postgres compat" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738235))
- Stores embeddings alongside transactional data (2 comments): "CockroachDB lets teams store embeddings alongside transactional data instead of stitching together OLTP + vector DB + cache." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46826628)) "We just shipped a set of tools to make CockroachDB more usable for AI agents in real-world environments." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601811))

## What people warn about

- Licensing changed to commercial terms (5 comments): "uses Cockroach which is now commercial, so potentially with the dual costs of Ory and Cockroach licenses" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671624)) "after Cockroach changed their free tier license" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46341650)) ""crazy licensing fees after x processes/users"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46540786))
- Hard to port existing code (3 comments): "The efforts we've undergone to make Oban (and Pro) work with CRDB have been ridiculous." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313824)) "It does not work the same way on CRDB and you will likely have to rewrite those queries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48807313)) "Making Cockroach work is more work than just wiring up the SQL" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671745))
- Slow writes and high costs (2 comments): "In a naive deployment it's significantly slower than operating on a single core, but that's the price that you pay" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566651)) "write latencies and costs were too high" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488114))
- Poor product name (2 comments): "I can't bring myself to use "CockroachDB" for example." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45931982)) "Great database, but man, what a terrible name." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094054))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [FoundationDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/foundationdb.md): 26 recommend
- [rqlite](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rqlite.md): 13 recommend
- [Apache Cassandra](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apache-cassandra.md): 12 recommend
- [TiDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tidb.md): 11 recommend
- [Marmot](https://hackerapproved.com/p/marmot.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

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