Why choose CockroachDB over Spanner?
Multiple clouds
CockroachDB can run anywhere, on any cloud, and even across multiple clouds and the hybrid cloud
Global transactions
CockroachDB has features like parallel commits and pipelining to optimize globally distributed transactions
Multi-region simplicity
CockroachDB provides simple DDL that allows you to define where data will live across multiple regions
Compare side-by-side
Features
Availability
All public clouds, on-prem and local
GCP Only
Architecture
Architected to resiliently span globally distributed data centers, while still being valuable in a single data center
Architected to span globally distributed data centers, yet still valuable in a single data center
Distributed transactions
Intelligent replication uses RAFT to place data and efficiently utilize available storage and compute resources
Limited ability to optimize latency concerns for multi-region writes
Multi-region writes
Advances in parallel commits and transaction pipelining reduce broad geographic transaction latencies
Limited ability to optimize latency concerns for multi-region writes
Data residency
Data is tied to a node at the row level to optimize performance and/or comply with data regulations
Entire database lives in each region with no control at row level for survival/latency/compliance goals for data
Hybrid and multi-cloud deployment
Run anywhere on any cloud and even across regions and clouds
Tied to GCP instances only, no options for multi and/or hybrid cloud
Pricing
Simple, straightforward pricing, plus the ability to tie data to a location to avoid egress costs
A la carte pricing for networking, storage and per-instance with limited availability
