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CrateDB vs PostgreSQL comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CrateDB
Ranking in Open Source Databases
17th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
PostgreSQL
Ranking in Open Source Databases
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of CrateDB is 1.0%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 14.4%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL14.4%
CrateDB1.0%
Other84.6%
Open Source Databases
 

Featured Reviews

FC
product owner at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Data platform has delivered real-time casino gameplay insights but still needs broader expertise
The best features CrateDB offers in my experience include many functionalities that allow you to purge data, maintain data, keep the database clean and essentially updated. CrateDB also allows us to store many records, and I think the performance is very strong compared to other databases or technologies. CrateDB's performance stood out for me as it allowed me to query results in less than seconds, which was optimal and enabled real-time analytics. I found it to be a very distributed SQL engine, which was beneficial considering our specific requirements. It supports multi-model and flexible schemas for structured and semi-structured data, JSON, time series for loads, and BLOBs, along with integrated performance improvements and faster ingestion than what I recall from other databases, plus better query optimizations. CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day. Positively, we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years.
Ece Ece - PeerSpot reviewer
Software developer at Student
Reliable transactions and rich features have powered real time collaboration and faster development
PostgreSQL fully supports ACID transactions, including atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability, which are some of the best features it offers in my experience. It also supports multiple index types, such as B-tree, Gin, Gist, and BRIN, and provides JSON and JSONB support, which is used to query semi-structured data. PostgreSQL uses Multi-Version Concurrency Control, which allows multiple users to read and write simultaneously. For extensibility, PostgreSQL allows extensions such as PostGIS and pg_trgm, which are truly useful. PostgreSQL improves reliability, performance, and scalability in production. Since it is ACID compliant, it ensures that database transactions are safe and consistent, preventing partial data updates, maintaining data integrity, and allowing multiple users to read or write data simultaneously using MVCC. Features such as foreign keys, constraints, and triggers impact data consistency by preventing invalid data. It supports read replicas, partitioning, and horizontal scaling for scalability. PostgreSQL has been very stable in my experience, handling concurrent requests reliably while maintaining data consistency with ACID transactions and accommodating concurrent users with strong data integrity, making it mature and widely used in production systems. Using PostgreSQL with Prisma allows faster development because schema migrations are automated and type-safe queries reduce the time I spend fixing database bugs, allowing me to focus more on building features while improving collaboration between developers due to a well-defined relational schema. Migration tools keep everyone's database schema synchronized, which allows multiple developers to work on backend features without conflicts. It has a rich feature set, supporting advanced features such as window functions, common table expressions (CTEs), and full-text search, with the flexibility of supporting both JSON and relational data, meaning it can behave as both a relational database and a document database. Extensibility allows PostgreSQL to add new capabilities while maintaining a strong ecosystem that integrates easily with modern backend stacks such as Node.js, Docker, and Prisma.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"CrateDB fit into my project very well as it was an excellent database that allowed me to query analyses I did not think I would be able to perform."
"CrateDB positively impacted my organization by reducing the time needed for processes, and its impressive scalability made it easy to start with one server and then horizontally scale to multiple nodes to retrieve data, which helped my company gain more customers."
"CrateDB has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to store several years of gameplay from our Asian customers, which involves millions and millions of records generated every day, and we did not experience significant downtimes or outages, meaning the gameplay was not affected at all during these two years."
"The most valuable features are the price, stability, it is scalable and is used by our clients in small business environments, and it is a simple product to use."
"The new JSON data type that allows to use some NoSQL-like functionality is great because it brings some of the most valuable features of NoSQL databases to relational databases."
"What I like is that it's quite powerful in terms of performance."
"The solution is quite stable."
"PostgreSQL is an amazing product."
"As it's open source the ROI is quick."
"PostgreSQL has complete SQL dialects and is useful for writing sophisticated and complex queries. We have experience with Oracle database. My partner is experienced in DDA and he writes sophisticated SQL queries. The solution helps to get the job done in the best possible way. In today’s age, most developers do not have strong SQL knowledge or language command. They find it difficult to write even a SQL statement. These developers write cool queries which perform badly on the database end. As DBAs, we constantly urge the developers not to write bad queries, help them learn more, and write placebo commands."
"I would recommend PostgreSQL to anyone who wants to save costs and deploy a reliable enterprise class database server."
 

Cons

"CrateDB was good regarding scalability, though not excellent."
"CrateDB can be improved as it is not very popular, which means there are not many people dedicated or experienced with this particular technology, making it less usable or suitable for many companies."
"One area for improvement in CrateDB could be the command line interface, as sometimes it was not very easy to understand."
"I find it difficult to get connectors on the tool. For example, .NET has only one free provider in PostgreSQL. I need to pay the provider if I need something more sophisticated features. Other languages like PHP and Java have good community support. We need community support for .NET."
"It would be great if the solution offered even more integration capabilities."
"PostgreSQL could be used for small to medium databases but not for a huge production database."
"I have noticed that it consumes a lot of resources."
"There are some products out there that have a slightly different method of implementation for the SQL language. Some of those are slightly better in some areas, and PostgreSQL is slightly better in some areas. I would probably like to match all of those products together. It is just down to the functionality. For example, Oracle has a number of options within SQL that are outside of what you would class as the SQL standard. PostgreSQL misses some of those, but PostgreSQL does other things that are better than what Oracle does. I would like to merge those two products so that there is a certain amount of functionality in a single product."
"Scalability; Although PostgreSQL is known for handling very well large amounts of workload, NoSQL databases performs better when scaling."
"I'd like to see better memory management. I think that that's one of the few areas that Postgres does not handle as well as MySQL does or did."
"There are several features I would like to improve that aren't working as expected. It's likely that the latest version is doing something that was missed in the previous versions. For example, the output parameters — the stored procedures — is something new in PostgreSQL that Firebird has already had for a long time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"It is free. There is no license on it."
"Affordable solution."
"This solution can offer a cheaper choice for customers since it is open-source."
"There is an annual license."
"It is an open-source platform."
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
"It is also open-source so it is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
24%
Computer Software Company
19%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Wholesaler/Distributor
9%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise27
Large Enterprise46
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CrateDB?
CrateDB was free when I used it, so there was no pricing associated with it, as we used the free version.
What needs improvement with CrateDB?
I wanted to use CrateDB for visualization as well, but it did not provide what I needed, so we had to opt for Grafana for the visualization instead. Regarding needed improvements, I was quite able ...
What is your primary use case for CrateDB?
I used CrateDB for a one-off project from April to August in 2025. My main use case was a digital twin project designed to create a FIWARE-based application with a focus on optimizing the data mana...
How does Firebird SQL compare with PostgreSQL?
PostgreSQL was designed in a way that provides you with not only a high degree of flexibility but also offers you a cheap and easy-to-use solution. It gives you the ability to redesign and audit yo...
What do you like most about PostgreSQL?
It's a transactional database, so we use Postgres for most of our reporting. That's where it's helping.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
The tool is free of cost. For now, it's not about making money. But once we perfect it, we can offer it to customers willing to pay for support and other services. Most of my deployments are free.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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Find out what your peers are saying about CrateDB vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,728 professionals have used our research since 2012.