CockroachDB Alternatives After the 2026 Pricing Change

The right CockroachDB alternative depends on whether you actually need distributed SQL. If you need multi-region writes that survive a region outage, the real alternatives are other distributed databases such as YugabyteDB or Google Spanner. If you picked CockroachDB for its old free tier and Postgres-style SQL, plain Postgres is usually simpler and cheaper: Neon or Prisma Postgres for serverless, PlanetScale Postgres for managed instances, or StitchDB and Supabase when you also want auth, APIs and storage.

That second group is large. Many developers chose CockroachDB because it had a free serverless plan and spoke the Postgres wire protocol. In 2026 the pricing page looks different, so it's worth checking whether you still fit.

#What changed in CockroachDB pricing

As of November 2026, the CockroachDB pricing page lists two cloud editions:

New organizations get a 30-day trial with $400 in credit. The page does not list a permanent free tier. If you were running a hobby project on the old free plan, check your account and the current terms with Cockroach Labs.

For self-hosting, Cockroach Labs retired the Core edition in late 2024 and moved to an Enterprise license that is free for individuals, students, researchers and businesses under $10M in annual revenue, renewed yearly (announcement).

#Do you need distributed SQL?

Answer these honestly before you compare vendors:

1. Must the database keep accepting writes when a whole cloud region goes down? If yes, you need a distributed database or a carefully built multi-region setup.
2. Do you need rows pinned to specific countries inside one logical database? CockroachDB's multi-region tables do this well.
3. Is your dataset or write rate bigger than one large server can handle? For most apps, one Postgres server with read replicas goes very far.

If all three are "no", a single-primary Postgres with backups, point-in-time recovery and read replicas covers you, and you get full Postgres compatibility in exchange.

#Compatibility you gain by moving to Postgres

CockroachDB speaks the Postgres wire protocol (v3.0), so most drivers and ORMs connect. But it's not Postgres. Its compatibility page lists differences, including no range types, no foreign data wrappers, no session-scoped advisory locks, no XML functions and no column-level privileges. Transactions default to SERIALIZABLE; READ COMMITTED is available when enabled.

Moving to real Postgres gives you extensions (pgvector, PostGIS, pg_cron, pg_trgm), the full set of types and the whole tool ecosystem. It also changes one behavior you may rely on: Postgres defaults to READ COMMITTED. If your code depends on serializable retries, set it explicitly:

begin isolation level serializable;
update accounts set balance = balance - 100 where id = 1;
update accounts set balance = balance + 100 where id = 2;
commit;

And retry on SQLSTATE 40001 (serialization failure) in your app, as you did with CockroachDB.

#The alternatives

#StitchDB

Each StitchDB project is a dedicated Postgres database with a connection pooler (port 5432 session mode, 6543 transaction mode), point-in-time recovery on every plan (24 hours on Free, 7 days on Pro, 14 on Scale, 30 on Enterprise) and read replicas on paid plans. On top you get Auth, auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs, Realtime, Storage and Edge Functions.

Read replicas cost $0.01 per replica-hour, and StitchDB's DNS sends REST reads to the nearest healthy replica when it's clearly closer than the primary. Writes always go to the primary. That covers "read close to users" for many apps that reached for CockroachDB for latency.

Trade-offs: StitchDB is not a distributed database. One primary handles writes, and all data centers are in the EU (Falkenstein, Nuremberg, Helsinki). If you need active-active writes across continents, it is the wrong tool. Full plan limits are on the pricing page.

#Neon

Serverless Postgres that separates storage and compute. Free projects scale to zero after 5 minutes and wake in a few hundred milliseconds. Paid plans are pure usage: $0.106 per CU-hour on Launch and $0.35 per GB-month of storage, with no monthly minimum. Branching is a core feature. See Serverless Postgres explained.

#Prisma Postgres

Prisma's managed Postgres. The free plan includes 50 databases, 200,000 operations a month and 2 GB of storage. Paid plans start at $10/month. Natural if your codebase is already on Prisma ORM.

#PlanetScale Postgres

PlanetScale now offers Postgres next to its Vitess (MySQL) product. The smallest Postgres node (PS-5, 1/16 vCPU and 512 MiB) is $5/month single-node or $15/month as a three-node HA cluster, in AWS us-east-1 pricing. A clean choice for a small dedicated database with failover.

#Supabase

Postgres with Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions, many regions and a self-hosted option. Free databases are 500 MB and pause after a week without activity; Pro starts at $25/month and includes $10 of compute credits.

#Staying distributed

If the answers to the three questions above were "yes", compare CockroachDB Standard with YugabyteDB and Spanner on their own pricing pages. Moving from one distributed database to a single-primary Postgres to save money, and then needing distribution again, is the expensive path.

#Migrating from CockroachDB to Postgres

1. Export the schema with SHOW CREATE ALL TABLES; and review it. Remove CockroachDB-only syntax such as hash-sharded index options and multi-region table localities (REGIONAL BY ROW, GLOBAL).
2. Check primary keys. CockroachDB schemas often use UUID DEFAULT gen_random_uuid() keys, which work unchanged in Postgres. unique_rowid() defaults need replacing, for example with bigint generated always as identity.
3. Export data to CSV with EXPORT INTO CSV (or IMPORT/COPY tooling) and load it with \copy in psql.
4. Re-create sequences and set them past the highest id.
5. Point your app at the new connection string. On StitchDB use port 6543 for serverless functions and 5432 for long-running servers and migrations; TLS is required.

psql "postgresql://p_<ref>_owner:<password>@<db-host>:5432/p_<ref>?sslmode=require" \
  -c "\copy public.orders from 'orders.csv' with (format csv, header true)"

#FAQ

#Does CockroachDB still have a free tier?

As of November 2026, the pricing page lists a 30-day trial with $400 in credit and no permanent free tier. The self-hosted Enterprise license is free for businesses under $10M annual revenue.

#Is CockroachDB compatible with Postgres?

It uses the Postgres wire protocol, so most drivers work, but some features are missing, including range types, foreign data wrappers and session advisory locks.

#What is the cheapest managed Postgres alternative?

Several have free tiers: StitchDB (500 MB per project, two projects), Neon (1 GB per project), Prisma Postgres (2 GB) and Supabase (500 MB). See Free Postgres hosting in 2026.

#Can StitchDB replace CockroachDB for multi-region apps?

Only for read latency through read replicas. It does not do multi-region writes.

Try a full Postgres backend with PITR on every plan: start free on StitchDB.