Amazon RDS vs PgCat
Amazon RDS
aws.amazon.comPgCat
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon RDS | PgCat |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 1 |
| Spec score · Database Proxy Software | 8.9 (#3) | 7.6 (#15) |
Plans
Amazon RDS
- AWS Free TierFree
- AWS Free Tier for RDSFree
- On-demandPrice not published
- On-Demand InstancesPrice not published
- Reserved InstancePrice not published
- Reserved InstancesPrice not published
In their own words
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
PgCat
PgCat is a free, open-source PostgreSQL pooler and proxy for self-hosted Linux deployments. Its stable features include transaction and session pooling. Read queries can be balanced across replicas and the primary, while health checks detect broken replicas and redirect queries to remaining servers. PgCat uses Tokio’s asynchronous runtime and a multithreaded design for multicore machines. Operators can view pooler statistics through the pgcat and pgbouncer admin databases or a Prometheus HTTP endpoint. Client and PostgreSQL server connections can use SSL/TLS, with MD5 and SCRAM-SHA-256 authentication supported. MD5 passthrough can use auth_query so cleartext passwords need not be stored in the configuration file. Docker deployment is documented, and a container image is published. Sharding syntax, comment parsing, automatic sharding, and mirroring are experimental. Transaction mode is enabled by default and does not support prepared statements, SET, or advisory locks. The project describes PgCat as stable and says it serves high query volumes in production. It is licensed under MIT.