Distributed SQL database built for cloud
Visit WebsiteThe Bottom Line
Entry price
Free plan available, paid tiers above
Biggest pro
Distributed SQL
Biggest con
Complex operations
TL;DR - CockroachDB
- 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
What is CockroachDB?
Available on: Web
Pros & Cons
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
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
Pricing Plans
Free TrialPricing checked Aug 18, 2026
Basic
Free
Serverless database with generous free tier and scale-to-zero
- 50M Request Units free/month
- 10 GiB storage free/month
- Scales to zero when idle
- Up to 30K RU/sec (~60 vCPUs)
- Up to 3 TiB storage
- AWS and GCP support
- Multi-region available
- IP allowlist access control
Standard
$0.18/per hour (2 vCPUs)
Provisioned compute with instant scaling for production workloads
- Provisioned compute up to 200 vCPUs
- Instant scaling
- On-demand storage
- AWS and GCP support
- Private connectivity
- Datadog metrics and log export
- 99.99% availability SLA
- Automatic 3x data replication
Advanced
$0.6/per hour (4 vCPUs)
Enterprise-grade with compliance, multi-cloud, and highest availability
- Provisioned compute with unlimited scaling
- Up to 10 TiB storage per node
- AWS, GCP, and Azure (all regions)
- Up to 99.999% availability SLA (multi-region)
- Customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK)
- PCI and HIPAA compliance controls
- Private connectivity
- Datadog integration
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 Standard plan ($0.18/hour for 2 vCPUs, ~$131/month) is where CockroachDB becomes a serious production database with provisioned compute and private connectivity.
The Advanced plan ($0.60/hour for 4 vCPUs, ~$438/month minimum) targets enterprises needing compliance (PCI/HIPAA), CMEK, and five-nines availability. 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. A 3-region Advanced deployment costs 3x the single-region price, a minimum of ~$1,314/month before storage.
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.
Advanced plan minimum is 4 vCPUs ($0.60/hour = ~$438/month), you cannot start smaller and scale up. If you need compliance features but have light workloads, you overpay for compute.
How CockroachDB Compares to Competitors
CockroachDB occupies a unique position: it is the only production-grade distributed SQL database that is fully PostgreSQL-compatible and available as a managed cloud service. Amazon Aurora offers PostgreSQL compatibility with better single-region performance and lower per-compute cost, but it cannot do true multi-region active-active writes. Google Spanner is the closest competitor in distributed SQL capability, but it uses a proprietary SQL dialect and costs significantly more ($0.90/node-hour vs $0.60/hour). PlanetScale (Vitess/MySQL) offers similar serverless scaling at lower prices but requires MySQL, not PostgreSQL. Neon and Supabase are excellent serverless PostgreSQL options that cost 50-70% less, but they are single-region databases without distributed SQL or automatic sharding. YugabyteDB is the main open-source alternative with PostgreSQL compatibility and distributed SQL, but its managed cloud service (Aeon) is less mature. Choose CockroachDB when you specifically need distributed SQL with strong consistency across regions, for single-region workloads, managed PostgreSQL (RDS, Cloud SQL, Neon) is simpler and cheaper.
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