# Turso 53 Hacker News commenters recommended Turso and 55 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Open-source, MIT-licensed SQLite-compatible database in Rust, with async I/O, concurrent writes, and a managed cloud option. Most common caveat: unproven stability and ties to the company's future. ## Why people recommend it - Concurrent writes and async I/O (7 comments): "If you start with SQLite but find you need async i/o, concurrent writers, and local replicas then Turso is a good option." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936257)) "they built a system that can provide substantially better concurrency and a better async story" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936382)) "They recently landed multi-writer support for their rust SQLite re-implementation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47618402)) - File-format compatibility with SQLite (2 comments): "Being file-format compatible with SQLite is really useful as well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735651)) "The big advantage is the file format compatibility." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46240959)) - Open source under MIT license (2 comments): "Turso has a booming OSS community with many contributors from outside the company and is fully MIT." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49937888)) "It's MIT licensed. Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46812819)) - Cheap for small projects (2 comments): "Cloudflare, Fly.io litestream offerings and Turso are pretty reasonably priced, given the global coverage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875044)) "it's cheaper than managed db services for small/toy projects of mine" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738978)) ## What people warn about - Unproven compared with SQLite (4 comments): "the Turso feature list is such a terrifying collection of high-risk, low-performance, inferior, unlikely to be compatible, unproven and unnecessary departures from SQLite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733906)) "I'm not ready to entertain Turso as an alternative to something that is as battle tested as Sqlite." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46812645)) "a new unproven DB vendor with a product that has been through the trial by fire of existing DBs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46822756)) - Tied to company's commercial future (4 comments): "I was a little worried that the turso project's future was tied to the success of turso the company" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49935170)) "I hope the highly talented people behind Turso will now build something new and beneficial to the world instead." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943597)) "If your use of their technology doesn't help them get there, you should expect to be rugpulled at some point." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46812351)) - Missing features and performance bugs (5 comments): "Didn't have a good experience with them. One day we suddenly started to experience severe latency spikes, lasting for more than a day, causing timeouts." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728239)) "the performance problem according to https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/1159 has not been yet solved" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49936001)) "Looks like it's still missing some important features like savepoints (!!!), windows and attach database." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727203)) - Code quality concerns about LLM code (2 comments): "the Turso feature list is such a terrifying collection of high-risk, low-performance, inferior, unlikely to be compatible, unproven and unnecessary departures from SQLite" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733906)) "I know that this codebase was heavily written by LLMs but the execution can't be this bad?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49935677)) ## 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 - [MariaDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mariadb.md): 40 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Turso", https://hackerapproved.com/p/turso/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).