What Is CockroachDB? Features, Pricing & Alternatives

Overview

CockroachDB, developed by Cockroach Labs, is a distributed SQL database that combines relational consistency and ACID transactions with horizontal scaling: nodes can be added to scale reads and writes, with automatic rebalancing and hotspot detection^[20]. It offers a PostgreSQL-compatible SQL interface with migration tools, globally consistent transactions, global writes and data locality controls for placing data near users or within jurisdictions^[20].

The managed service, Cockroach Continuum, is sold in two editions. Standard is priced at US$0.092 per vCPU-hour, about US$203 per month for 2 vCPUs and 100 GB on AWS us-east-1, although the features section quotes a rate from US$0.057; Mission Critical costs US$0.162 per vCPU-hour, about US$1,528 per month for 12 vCPUs and 100 GB^[19]. Both come with a 30-day trial and US$400 of credit^[19]. A self-hosted edition with enterprise security features is sold through sales^[20]. CockroachDB suits applications that must survive regional outages, but its distributed architecture adds latency to some transactions compared with single-node PostgreSQL, and not every PostgreSQL feature or extension is supported.

What CockroachDB does

Distributed ACID transactions
PostgreSQL-compatible SQL
Automatic rebalancing
Data locality controls
Global writes

CockroachDB pricing

Standard: US$0.092/vCPU-hour (about US$203/month for 2 vCPU, 100 GB); Mission Critical: US$0.162/vCPU-hour (about US$1,528/month for 12 vCPU). 30-day trial with US$400 credit. Self-hosted via sales.