Turso

What hackers pick instead

• PostgreSQLA free, open-source relational database people trust for nearly everything (queues, JSON, search, vectors) and run for years; critics cite query planner limits and horizontal scaling difficulty.816recommend
• MySQLA fast, mature open-source database praised for replication, easy upgrades and low maintenance; critics cite historical footguns and doubts about its future under Oracle.124recommend
• Microsoft SQL ServerRecommended as a batteries-included, hands-off database with strong tooling, documentation and a free Express edition. Main caveat is per-core licensing cost.73recommend
• Microsoft AccessLets non-developers build working database apps with forms and VBA quickly. Common caveat: it does not scale well and its apps become hard to maintain.62recommend
• MariaDBFree open-source database praised for its feature set, openness and production use. Critics most often question the corporate ownership and its drift from MySQL.40recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 135 comments. Each links to the original.

1. If you start with SQLite but find you need async i/o, concurrent writers, and local replicas then Turso is a good option.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

2. Cloudflare, Fly.io litestream offerings and Turso are pretty reasonably priced, given the global coverage.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Bunny Database”

3. I was a little worried that the turso project's future was tied to the success of turso the company

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

4. Turso has a booming OSS community with many contributors from outside the company and is fully MIT.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

5. they built a system that can provide substantially better concurrency and a better async story

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

6. They recently landed multi-writer support for their rust SQLite re-implementation

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had”

7. It's MIT licensed. Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

8. they already have concurrent writes working for their rust implementation

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

9. Concurrent writes already working is a reasonable definition of success.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

10. With Turso's efforts to improve concurrency, it can go further still.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

11. it's cheaper than managed db services for small/toy projects of mine

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

12. Being file-format compatible with SQLite is really useful as well.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

13. the free tier and that the API works with tokio nicely

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”

14. The big advantage is the file format compatibility.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Stoolap: High-performance embedded SQL database in pure Rust”

15. 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

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

16. 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.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

17. I hope the highly talented people behind Turso will now build something new and beneficial to the world instead.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

18. the performance problem according to https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/1159 has not been yet solved

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

19. If your use of their technology doesn't help them get there, you should expect to be rugpulled at some point.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

20. Looks like it's still missing some important features like savepoints (!!!), windows and attach database.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

21. You can't set PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL and expect to be able to read database state from another process.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

22. I'm not ready to entertain Turso as an alternative to something that is as battle tested as Sqlite.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

23. a new unproven DB vendor with a product that has been through the trial by fire of existing DBs

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

24. I know that this codebase was heavily written by LLMs but the execution can't be this bad?

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

25. hoping that someone bases anything important on Turso looks like grabbing captive users

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

26. I've been trying for more than a year to make TursoDB load a single file, and it fails

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “The Wonders of AI: We Are Retiring Our Bug Bounty Program”

27. ends up more fragile because the incumbent has years of testing and fixing behind it

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

28. You need long term stability for a project like this, slow incremental development with a long term plan, and that's antithetical to VC culture.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

29. Pretty good vector processing built-in. Time series capabilities. Nice Change-Data-Capture table that I've used & loved.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

30. SQLite/Turso probably offers a much better developer experience than Postgres for the overwhelming majority of projects

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

31. I'd just remove that if I were the devs, because everything else there makes me find the project at least interesting

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

32. I'm mixed, but somewhat enthusiastic on Turso's efforts to create client-server options and replication.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Deep dive into Turso, the "SQLite rewrite in Rust"”

33. A shared Turso database would probably be a bit more practical than the rpc system, honestly.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “We Scaled PgBouncer to 4× Higher Throughput”

34. I believe in the Turso Founders made this movement to start a new paragraph in Turso history

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

35. You can self-host Turso at the start, and you can gracefully scale to managed Turso (cloud)

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

36. it’s rock solid other than if I make super deeply nested joins which overflow something

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”

37. The team is very based and I've learned a lot contributing to Turso, amazing people

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

38. Turso supports features I want that don't exist and will not exist in sqlite.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

39. Supabase sees Turso as the answer to workloads not well-suited for Postgres.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Supabase is acquiring Turso”

40. It natively supports vector embeddings, which seems like it could be nice.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite”