PlanetScale Vitess vs CockroachDB
A detailed comparison to help you choose between PlanetScale Vitess and CockroachDB.
Quick Verdict
4.8/5
PlanetScale Vitess
205 reviews
4.4/5
CockroachDB
357 reviews
PlanetScale Vitess is rated higher (4.8 vs 4.4). 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 is a distributed SQL database built to survive datacenter failures. Postgres-compatible, strong consistency, and automatic scaling across regions. Serverless and dedicated options.
PlanetScale Vitess MySQL-compatible serverless — Vitess under the hood | CockroachDB Distributed SQL database that survives failures | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.8 (205 reviews)✓ | 4.4 (357 reviews) |
| Pricing model | free | freemium |
| Starting price | Free | Free tier available |
| Best for | Database engineers wanting to understand or self-host the Vitess technology underlying PlanetScale | Applications requiring high availability across multiple regions where database availability is mission-critical |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceself hostableapi access | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi access |
| Visit PlanetScale Vitess → | Visit CockroachDB → | |
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
CockroachDB
Pros
- + Survives datacenter failures by design
- + Postgres-compatible SQL
- + Automatic geographic distribution
Cons
- - More complex than standard Postgres
- - Free tier limits apply
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