# PgDog

38 Hacker News commenters recommended PgDog and 8 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a transparent Postgres connection pooler that works without app changes. Caveat: it does not detect primary failure, and sharding still needs care.

## Why people recommend it

- Stable and battle-tested in production (5 comments): "Load balancer with health checks and failover, works out of the box. Battle-tested at this point too, so could be worth a look." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479543)) "It's been incredibly stable. It's nifty how they've solved the LISTEN/NOTIFY on a transaction pooler problem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477525)) "Now we're used in production by some pretty big companies, which is exciting!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156132))
- Smoother than PgBouncer migrations (4 comments): "We used `pgdog` as a proxy during a recent database backend migration (Heroku -> EC2 -> RDS) and it was much smoother than PgBouncer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48489265)) "It was built to fix some of PgBouncers shortcomings that we ran into at Instacart" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48874193)) "I've moved from pgbouncer to pgdog a few months ago without issue." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476917))
- Transparent to clients and applications (3 comments): "having the proxy absorb that chaos at the wire protocol level is much better than trying to handle it in application code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47133196)) "This solves the thousands of clients case for read in a way that is transparent to the clients." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477763)) "pgdog is particularly testable since it is trying for complete transparency" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48840229))
- Reuses connections, scales clients (3 comments): "It's still providing value by reusing connections, which are particularly expensive in postgres." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48485028)) "It really helped us scale our connection proxy needs pretty substantially" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477192)) "these can scale out horizontally, so you get true unlimited scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506310))

## What people warn about

- Sharding still needs care (2 comments): "it's not doing magic, you still have to be aware how it works and the limitations of sharding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48488610)) "Even with a proxy like PgDog the Postgres sharding story isn't solved." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482361))
- Crashes, lacks crash protection (2 comments): "It feels better now, but we still need to add crash protection" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125812)) "it crashed when doing a very specific bulk load" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128649))
- Less proven than alternatives (2 comments): "I'd have a hard time convincing my boss to go with PGDog over a more stable and tested solution." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48491734)) "You'd need a ton of faith in these 3 people." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48478054))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [PgBouncer](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgbouncer.md): 37 recommend
- [Vitess](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vitess.md): 14 recommend
- [Multigres](https://hackerapproved.com/p/multigres.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

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