CockroachDB vs PlanetScale Vitess
A detailed comparison to help you choose between CockroachDB and PlanetScale Vitess.
Quick Verdict
4.4/5
CockroachDB
357 reviews
4.8/5
PlanetScale Vitess
205 reviews
PlanetScale Vitess is rated higher (4.8 vs 4.4). CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built to survive datacenter failures. Postgres-compatible, strong consistency, and automatic scaling across regions. Serverless and dedicated options. PlanetScale is built on Vitess, the database scaling technology developed at YouTube and used to serve billions of queries. Horizontal sharding, schema migrations via Pull Requests, and serverless scaling.
CockroachDB Distributed SQL database that survives failures | PlanetScale Vitess MySQL-compatible serverless — Vitess under the hood | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.4 (357 reviews) | 4.8 (205 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | free |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best for | Applications requiring high availability across multiple regions where database availability is mission-critical | Database engineers wanting to understand or self-host the Vitess technology underlying PlanetScale |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi access | free tieropen sourceself hostableapi access |
| Visit CockroachDB → | Visit PlanetScale Vitess → | |
CockroachDB
Pros
- + Survives datacenter failures by design
- + Postgres-compatible SQL
- + Automatic geographic distribution
Cons
- - More complex than standard Postgres
- - Free tier limits apply
PlanetScale Vitess
Pros
- + Open-source Vitess powering PlanetScale
- + YouTube-scale tested
- + Horizontal sharding for MySQL
Cons
- - Complex to self-host
- - No foreign key support in Vitess
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