CockroachDB vs Turso

CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that speaks the Postgres wire protocol. Your existing Postgres drivers, ORMs, and queries work without changes. The key selling point is resilience — data is automatically replicated across nodes, so a zone going down does not take your database offline. The Serverless free tier gives you 10 GiB of storage and 50 million request units, which covers a moderate production workload.

For most solo founders, CockroachDB is more database than you need. The distributed architecture adds write latency (each write requires consensus across nodes), and you are paying that cost even if your app runs in a single region. Where it makes sense is if you are building something that genuinely needs multi-region availability or you want to avoid ever dealing with database failovers. For simpler use cases, Neon or Supabase give you standard Postgres with less overhead.

Turso takes SQLite and makes it work as a cloud database. Each database is a LibSQL file replicated across edge locations, so reads happen in single-digit milliseconds from wherever your users are. The per-database model is ideal for multi-tenant apps where each user or workspace gets their own isolated database.

The free tier gives you 9 GB of storage and 500 databases, which is enough to run a real SaaS with per-tenant data. The limitation is writes — all writes route through a single primary region, so write-heavy workloads will not benefit from the edge replication. If your app is read-heavy (dashboards, content sites, analytics), Turso is fast and cheap. If you need complex relational queries or heavy write throughput, Postgres on Neon or Supabase is a better foundation.