CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built for resilience and scale, PostgreSQL-compatible. Compare Basic, Standard, Advanced, and self-hosted pricing.
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built by Cockroach Labs, founded in 2015 by former Google engineers Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell, who previously worked on Google's Spanner distributed database. It is designed to survive node, data center, and even regional failures while maintaining strong consistency and PostgreSQL wire compatibility.
Headquartered in New York City, Cockroach Labs has raised over $800 million across nine funding rounds, including a $278 million Series F led by Greenoaks that valued the company at approximately $5 billion.
CockroachDB automatically shards, replicates, and rebalances data using the Raft consensus protocol, enabling multi-active availability that keeps a cluster serving reads and writes even during regional outages. Geo-partitioning lets specific data be pinned to specific regions for data residency and latency requirements.
Recent additions include AI-oriented capabilities such as an MCP server, a ccloud CLI, agent skills, and distributed vector indexing, reflecting growing demand for databases that natively support AI agent and RAG workloads.
CockroachDB Cloud offers three tiers: Basic (pay-as-you-go, starting free with 50M request units and 10 GiB storage monthly), Standard (provisioned compute starting at $0.18/hour for 2 vCPUs), and Advanced (starting at $0.60/hour for 4 vCPUs, with unlimited scaling and compliance features like CMEK and HIPAA/PCI-DSS support).
Self-hosted CockroachDB is source-available; since an August 2024 licensing change, companies with more than $10 million in annual revenue must pay a per-CPU-core fee to self-host, while smaller companies and startups below that threshold can use the same enterprise-grade version free of charge.
CockroachDB Cloud's Basic tier is free to start, including 50 million request units and 10 GiB of storage per month. Self-hosted CockroachDB is also free for companies with less than $10 million in annual revenue; larger companies pay a per-CPU-core fee under the current licensing model introduced in August 2024.
CockroachDB is source-available rather than strictly open source under OSI definitions. The source code is publicly viewable, but commercial self-hosted use by companies above $10 million in annual revenue requires a paid license.
Yes, CockroachDB is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL, so applications can generally connect using standard PostgreSQL drivers, ORMs, and tools with minimal changes.
Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell, all former Google engineers who previously worked on Google's Spanner distributed database.
Basic is a pay-as-you-go serverless tier that scales to zero, suited for bursty workloads. Standard offers provisioned compute for steady workloads at scale. Advanced adds unlimited scaling, multi-region support across AWS/GCP/Azure, up to 99.999% uptime, and compliance features like CMEK and HIPAA/PCI-DSS support.
CockroachDB uses the Raft consensus protocol to replicate data across multiple nodes and regions, enabling multi-active availability so the cluster continues serving reads and writes even if a node or an entire region fails.