# DuckDB WASM

11 Hacker News commenters recommended DuckDB WASM and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Lets people run SQL queries directly in the browser against local data such as Parquet files, without a backend server. Critics note the WebAssembly build lacks some features of the native version and the download is heavy.

## Why people recommend it

- Run SQL in the browser (2 comments): "It's cool to be able to write SQL directly in a browser and not have to rely on REST/Graphql/etc to access the data layer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49332606)) "I've built some fun stuff like that myself" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214623))
- Query Parquet files directly (2 comments): "The choice to use DuckDB WASM for querying parquet files directly in the browser is clever" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532611)) "DuckDB-Wasm for querying the instance data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46088211))
- Handles millions of rows (2 comments): "you can shove ~2-3 million rows to a browser based query engine in 16-20Mb with duckdb-wasm" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50184409)) "it seems to work fine with ~160k rows" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601472))

## What people warn about

- Missing features versus native build (2 comments): "we found out the hard way some specific features turned out not to be supported with WASM + parquet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780815)) "the WASM build doesn't have feature-parity with the "normal" variant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780399))
- Heavy download size (1 comments): "The wasm is pretty heavy data-wise tho" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648592))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [SQLite](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sqlite.md): 847 recommend
- [PGlite](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pglite.md): 49 recommend
- [Stoolap](https://hackerapproved.com/p/stoolap.md): 9 recommend
- [SlateDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/slatedb.md): 6 recommend
- [SlothDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/slothdb.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "DuckDB WASM", https://hackerapproved.com/p/duckdb-wasm/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).