ActorDB vs Google Cloud Spanner
ActorDB
actordb.com
Google Cloud Spanner
cloud.google.comSide by side
| Figure | ActorDB | Google Cloud Spanner |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 7 |
| Spec score · Distributed SQL Databases | 7.8 (#13) | 8.3 (#10) |
| Availability | The maker says ActorDB has no single point of failure and that a follower can become an actor's leader when a server goes offline. | Google says Spanner delivers up to 99.999% availability and offers single-region, dual-region, and multi-region configurations. |
| Scaling | The maker says ActorDB can scale horizontally to hundreds of nodes and petabytes of data. | Spanner provides horizontal read and write scalability, automatic database sharding, and geo-partitioning. |
| Transactions | Transactions affect only the actors that participate in them, and the product supports ACID transactions across multiple actors. | Spanner provides strong transactional consistency and describes its transactions as Strong-ACID with TrueTime ordering. |
Plans
Google Cloud Spanner
- StandardPrice not published
- EnterprisePrice not published
- Enterprise PlusPrice not published
- Spanner free trial instanceFree
- Standard edition compute$0.03 a month
- Enterprise edition compute$0.04 a month
- Enterprise Plus edition compute$0.06 a month
In their own words
ActorDB
ActorDB is an open-source distributed relational SQL database from Biokoda that organizes data into independent actors. SQLite handles SQL queries and LMDB provides storage. Applications connect through the MySQL protocol or Thrift, and the FAQ recommends Thrift; default MySQL drivers also work. ActorDB uses Raft for distributed consensus and write replication, and describes itself as strongly consistent. Transactions can span multiple actors and are described as ACID compliant. It can also provide a sharded key-value store with structured values, multiple columns, and foreign tables. The maker says horizontal scaling can reach hundreds of nodes and petabytes when data is spread across actors. If a server fails, a follower can lead an actor while a cluster majority remains online. Recommended cluster sizes are 1, 3, or 5 nodes. Supported downloads include Windows, Mac OS X, CentOS, and Ubuntu, with version 0.10.29 dated 1 October 2019 shown as the latest stable release.
Google Cloud Spanner
Google Cloud Spanner is a paid database service combining relational, graph, key-value, and search capabilities. It provides Strong-ACID transactions ordered with TrueTime, horizontal read and write scaling, automatic sharding, and geo-partitioning. Configurations include single-region, dual-region, and multi-region deployments, with Google describing availability up to 99.999%. Spanner Graph, vector search, and built-in full-text search are included. A columnar engine supports ad hoc analytics on live data, and BigQuery integration enables federated queries. Spanner Omni is downloadable for on-premises, cross-cloud, or laptop deployment. Client libraries cover C++, C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Integrations include Cloud Run, Dataflow, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, GKE, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and Looker. Security includes encryption in transit and identity and access controls. PostgreSQL compatibility, horizontal scaling, multi-region deployment, geo-partitioning, and HTAP workloads are listed.