# SpacetimeDB

26 Hacker News commenters recommended SpacetimeDB and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Fans praise its speed and its blend of actor-style processing with relational data for persistent games. Critics say benchmarks are misleading and it does not clearly match CockroachDB's failure tolerance.

## Why people recommend it

- Very fast performance (4 comments): "As someone who has been using alot of spacetime for side projects, I am continually impressed with the speed at which it operates." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566397)) "Using the same module written in Rust, we can do even better on the same machine, 165k+ TPS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138024)) "we're so far out ahead of typical database performance for most OLTP workloads" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390231))
- Good fit for persistent game state (3 comments): "We feel very comfortable that it's the most performant backend for persistent games though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566159)) "This looks very promising. There's a need for persisting game state in a central place" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157458)) "SpacetimeDB has worked very well in my game so far." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47215255))
- Liked by developers overall (4 comments): "I think the product is great and I do really like it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160105)) "SpacetimeDB has worked very well in my game so far." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47215255)) "I like the core idea quite a bit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390746))

## What people warn about

- Benchmarks seen as misleading (4 comments): "I'm not sure that the comparison between CRDB is a good one." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566651)) "It felt a little dishonest due to using different clients, protocols, concurrency, etc in the benchmarks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47148921)) "SpacetimeDBs “benchmarks” might be the most egregious, blatantly misleading benchmark I’ve ever seen" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48688946))
- Risk of data loss on crash (3 comments): "I don't see anything that indicates how spacetime solves the core problem CRDB does, which is guaranteeing that single node failures can be tolerated with zero data loss or loss of availability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568788)) "They are yolo mode by default with periodic fsync and a big mutex around every reducer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566992)) "If rolling back a few minutes is tolerable in exceptional scenarios then I disagree." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566509))
- Global lock limits concurrency (4 comments): "I concede that we do have a big lock. But that is only because we did the alternative first and it performed worse" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567037)) "They are yolo mode by default with periodic fsync and a big mutex around every reducer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566992)) "I don't think this can compare with TigerBeetle just because both are single threaded" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415836))
- Lock-in and restrictive license (2 comments): "i am reluctant to be tied into a platform that my project cannot work without" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204247)) "Not an opened source license, they allow to use only 1 production server" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137904))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [PostgreSQL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql.md): 816 recommend
- [MySQL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mysql.md): 124 recommend
- [Microsoft SQL Server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-sql-server.md): 73 recommend
- [Microsoft Access](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-access.md): 62 recommend
- [Turso](https://hackerapproved.com/p/turso.md): 53 recommend

## Cite as

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