CockroachDB
Ranked 3 of 9 distributed databases by recommenders
Recommended for scaling, fault tolerance and Postgres compatibility. Critics mainly cite the move from Apache to a commercial license and extra work porting queries.
Recommended for scaling, fault tolerance and Postgres compatibility. Critics mainly cite the move from Apache to a commercial license and extra work porting queries.
30 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 19
- criticize it
- 11
- approval share
- 63%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 19 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Fault tolerance and failover built in
“Building reliability and failover is actually a fun engineering problem, use CockroachDB and RustFS.”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers” “they all give you fault tolerance for free without much involvement from your side”
Comment from 1 May 2026 in “Does Postgres Scale?” Postgres-compatible, horizontally scalable
“They are horizontally scalable, support postgres”
Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6” “Yugabyte or CockroachDB for Postgres compat”
Comment from 30 Jun 2026 in “Looking Ahead to Postgres 19” Stores embeddings alongside transactional data
“CockroachDB lets teams store embeddings alongside transactional data instead of stitching together OLTP + vector DB + cache.”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “VectorDBBench Now Supports CockroachDB” “We just shipped a set of tools to make CockroachDB more usable for AI agents in real-world environments.”
Comment from 1 Apr 2026 in “CockroachDB has just dropped a bunch of AI-ready features”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Licensing changed to commercial terms
“uses Cockroach which is now commercial, so potentially with the dual costs of Ory and Cockroach licenses”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all” “after Cockroach changed their free tier license”
Comment from 21 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres” “"crazy licensing fees after x processes/users"”
Comment from 8 Jan 2026 in “Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team” - Comment from 22 Aug 2026 in “The road to ACID transactions in Cassandra 6”
- Comment from 11 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”
Hard to port existing code
“The efforts we've undergone to make Oban (and Pro) work with CRDB have been ridiculous.”
Comment from 28 May 2026 in “Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows” “It does not work the same way on CRDB and you will likely have to rewrite those queries”
Comment from 6 Jul 2026 in “You probably don't need another database” “Making Cockroach work is more work than just wiring up the SQL”
Comment from 25 Jun 2026 in “Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all” Slow writes and high costs
“In a naive deployment it's significantly slower than operating on a single core, but that's the price that you pay”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Ok, but does it scale?” “write latencies and costs were too high”
Comment from 29 Aug 2026 in “Monzo Stand-In” Poor product name
“I can't bring myself to use "CockroachDB" for example.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “Bitchat for Gaza – messaging without internet” “Great database, but man, what a terrible name.”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “Neckbeard – A DevOps/platform/SRE plugin for your agent”
Other distributed databases people recommend
The four most recommended other distributed databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FoundationDB | 26 | 6 | 81% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Google Cloud Spanner | 23 | 2 | 92% | 9 | — | Approved |
| CockroachDBThis page | 19 | 11 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| rqlite | 13 | 4 | 76% | 5 | — | Approved |
| Apache Cassandra | 12 | 15 | 44% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
26 of the 31 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Great database, but man, what a terrible name.”
“In a naive deployment it's significantly slower than operating on a single core, but that's the price that you pay”
“write latencies and costs were too high”
“Same issue we had with cockroach.”
“cocroach is also open source no anymore.”
“They are horizontally scalable, support postgres”
“why they went with Cockroach DB for Oxide”
“It does not work the same way on CRDB and you will likely have to rewrite those queries”
“Yugabyte or CockroachDB for Postgres compat”
“Making Cockroach work is more work than just wiring up the SQL”
“uses Cockroach which is now commercial, so potentially with the dual costs of Ory and Cockroach licenses”
“The efforts we've undergone to make Oban (and Pro) work with CRDB have been ridiculous.”
“CockroachDB went from Apache to BSL”
“they all give you fault tolerance for free without much involvement from your side”
“where I can get some of the scaling features while still being able to have some level of structured data”
“Building reliability and failover is actually a fun engineering problem, use CockroachDB and RustFS.”
“We just shipped a set of tools to make CockroachDB more usable for AI agents in real-world environments.”
“which all come with various downsides.”
“CockroachDB lets teams store embeddings alongside transactional data instead of stitching together OLTP + vector DB + cache.”
“"crazy licensing fees after x processes/users"”
“everything you get for free in postgres or mysql or cockroach”
“after Cockroach changed their free tier license”
“I'd probably go a step further and argue that Neon/CockroachDB Serverless is good enough for most people”
“If you use kine+cockroachdb or tidb you can go even higher”
“I can't bring myself to use "CockroachDB" for example.”
“you can get very similar characteristics, though a more painful devex out of say CockroachDB”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.