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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
20th
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
7.4
Number of Reviews
128
Ranking in other categories
Vector Databases (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Open Source Databases category, the mindshare of CrateDB is 1.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PostgreSQL is 12.6%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Open Source Databases Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
PostgreSQL12.6%
CrateDB1.1%
Other86.3%
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.
Shobhit Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Science Architect at publicis Sapient
High-volume transactions have reduced failures and improve customer service efficiency
The best feature is performance, because of which I decided on PostgreSQL. I have also enabled the PG vector plugin on top of PostgreSQL. I have the opportunity to use two different features and two different flavors in a single product, which is the best thing about PostgreSQL. Initially, we had some hiccups around the performance part, but later we did indexing in PostgreSQL and now it is working very well. Even when we are doing 100,000 transactions in a day, PostgreSQL is working excellently. The interface is another best feature. If I need to do any query, I simply install the plugin on my local, which is pgAdmin. Through pgAdmin, I am able to communicate with PostgreSQL and execute all my SQL queries. I am getting a better UI with PostgreSQL as the backend, which is also one of the best options. PG vector is also very strong from PostgreSQL where I have implemented RAG and on a daily basis, I inject thousands of pages of PDF. More than 100 PDFs are coming into my system and one PDF is around 1,000 pages. We are injecting them into PostgreSQL and converting them into dimensions and inserting them into PG vector. The level of transactions we are doing on a daily basis is substantial, and we are getting very good throughput and low latency from PostgreSQL. When we were doing more than 50,000 transactions in a minute with the previous database, we were getting a lot of latency issues with threads getting blocked and abruptly closed unwantedly. After doing extensive research, we decided to move to PostgreSQL. Now, we are doing around 100,000 transactions in PostgreSQL and we are getting good throughput with no latency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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 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."
"PostgreSQL gives you much more flexibility because it's open source."
"We switched to PostgreSQL and never looked back."
"The performance is good."
"This is an open-source solution, operates at a high speed, and supports more than one SQL language."
"Because we use it in many information systems (Financial, Human Resources, Inventory Management) in several large companies with significant data flow, we have not had problems."
"I like to work with a piece of software that is bug free and doesn't require to be launched in order that users will find a couple of bugs in the coming weeks and that the company has to fix it."
"The PostgreSQL database is similar to the SQL Server but has a slightly different technology that has similar resources as well, and if the customer has the confidence using SQL Server, they will be fairly comfortable using this solution."
"It's very stable."
 

Cons

"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."
"CrateDB was good regarding scalability, though not excellent."
"One of the features it needs is a tighter integration with business intelligence software, so that the optimisation of the requests can be handled natively in the database."
"It could be improved by using parallelization. You want basically, distributed computing."
"The multi-master replication feature needs improvement."
"The price could be better."
"I have faced a few issues while installing it and configuring it; most of them related to incompatibility while using old Ubuntu Linux versions."
"Improved support for parallel query execution Merge Joins Improved Handling of Materialized Views"
"I think that due to the lack of functionality for data warehousing, it is more suitable for operational information systems instead of BI systems."
"It is missing some key scalability features such as sharding and automatic failover, but the Postgres developers are working on adding these features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is open source. There is no licensing."
"Our company pays for it. There are free versions available, but for advanced features, you obviously have to pay."
"It could be much cheaper. If you would like to build an application on Amazon today, PostgreSQL is the standard database with Redshift. If you want other databases, you can add them, but PostgreSQL is the basis of everything. It's a question of money, that's it."
"There is an annual license."
"We do not pay for licensing."
"The need for our customers to pay for licences is contingent on their projects and budgets."
"PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database."
"It is an open-source platform."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
University
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business58
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise49
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PostgreSQL?
I am not directly involved in the licensing or procurement decisions, so I cannot comment in detail on the price. From an engineering perspective, PostgreSQL is cost-efficient because it is open so...
What needs improvement with PostgreSQL?
While improving reliability, I have noticed that the limitations in PostgreSQL can be complex. For large-scale deployments, configuration, performance tuning, and related tasks can be complex and i...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
1. Apple 2. Cisco 3. Fujitsu 4. Instagram 5. Netflix 6. Red Hat 7. Sony 8. Uber 9. Cisco Systems 10. Skype 11. LinkedIn 12. Etsy 13. Yelp 14. Reddit 15. Dropbox 16. Slack 17. Twitch 18. WhatsApp 19. Snapchat 20. Shazam 21. SoundCloud 22. The New York Times 23. Cisco WebEx 24. Atlassian 25. Cisco Meraki 26. Heroku 27. GitLab 28. Zalando 29. OpenTable 30. Trello 31. Square Enix 32. Bloomberg
Find out what your peers are saying about CrateDB vs. PostgreSQL and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.