The Bottom Line
- Price
- Free plan available, paid tiers above. Compare plans
Key facts
- CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that survives failures and scales horizontally
- It provides PostgreSQL compatibility with automatic sharding and multi-region deployment
- Offers a free Serverless tier, with paid tiers available
Pros
- Distributed SQL
- PostgreSQL compatible
- Multi-region
- Strong consistency
- Good scaling
Cons
- Complex operations
- Expensive at scale
- Learning curve
- Latency vs single-node
- Specific use cases
What is CockroachDB?
Available on: Web
Ratings Across the Web
CockroachDB holds an aggregate rating of 4.3 out of 5 from 29 reviews across G2, last checked August 25, 2026.
Ratings aggregated from independent review platforms. Learn more
Key Features
- Distributed SQL
- Multi-region replication
- Automatic failover
- ACID transactions
- PostgreSQL compatibility
- Scales to zero
- Private connectivity
- PCI/HIPAA compliance
Pricing Plans
Free TrialPricing checked Oct 9, 2026
| Plan | Price | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0 | Serverless database with generous free tier and scale-to-zero
+8 more Show less
|
| Standard | $0.18/per hour (2 vCPUs) | Provisioned compute with instant scaling for production workloads
+6 more Show less
|
| Advanced Popular | $0.6/per hour (4 vCPUs) | Enterprise-grade with compliance, multi-cloud, and highest availability
+7 more Show less
|
Is CockroachDB worth the price?
CockroachDB offers one of the most compelling free tiers in the database market, 50M Request Units and 10 GiB storage per month with scale-to-zero is enough to run a real production app at low traffic for free.
The serverless Basic plan is the standout: you pay nothing until you exceed generous limits, and the overage pricing ($0.20/M RUs + $0.50/GiB) is transparent. The core value proposition is PostgreSQL compatibility with built-in distributed SQL, automatic replication, and multi-region support, features that would require significant engineering effort to build on top of vanilla PostgreSQL.
The tradeoff: CockroachDB is 15-30% more expensive than managed PostgreSQL (RDS, Cloud SQL) for equivalent compute, but you get survivability and horizontal scaling that those services cannot match without manual sharding.
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
Request Unit consumption varies dramatically by query complexity. A simple key lookup costs ~1 RU, but a full table scan or complex JOIN can consume thousands of RUs. The 50M free RUs can evaporate quickly with unoptimized queries.
Storage includes 3x replication overhead. If you store 10 GiB of logical data, CockroachDB replicates it to 3 nodes, but you are billed on logical storage (10 GiB), not physical (30 GiB). This is fair but worth understanding for capacity planning.
Multi-region deployments multiply costs
each region runs its own set of nodes.
Cross-region reads and writes consume more RUs due to consensus latency. A write that touches 3 regions costs ~3x the RUs of a local write.
Egress/bandwidth charges are not included in CockroachDB pricing, the underlying cloud provider (AWS/GCP/Azure) charges separately for data transfer out of their network.
The Standard plan (preview) pricing may change before GA. Early adopters should confirm pricing locks or migration paths.
If you need compliance features but have light workloads, you overpay for compute.
Reviews
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CockroachDB FAQ
How does CockroachDB support applications requiring global scale?
Which teams would benefit most from using CockroachDB?
How does CockroachDB compare to PostgreSQL?
What kind of trade-offs should users consider when adopting CockroachDB?
How is CockroachDB priced?
Can CockroachDB maintain strong data consistency across multiple cloud regions?
Does CockroachDB integrate with major cloud providers?
Source: cockroachlabs.com