CockroachDB Cloud vs H2 Database Engine

CockroachDB Cloud is a managed distributed SQL platform for development, testing, and production workloads. It provisions clusters, scales compute and storage, performs rolling upgrades, and manages backups. The database supports ACID transactions and can scale reads and writes horizontally without manual sharding. Deployments can span AWS, Azure, and GCP, including multiple providers and regions. Cockroach Labs' Terraform provider and Cloud APIs support operation automation. Security features include TLS for traffic between clients and servers and between nodes, cloud-provider disk encryption at rest, and column-level encryption. The listed plans include Basic at free and Standard at $0.06 a month; usage is metered by the minute, billed monthly, and rates vary by region. New Cloud organizations receive a 30-day trial with $400 in credits. The trial ends after 30 days or when the credits run out, and clusters are then paused. Pricing terms also distinguish deployments created before and from September 15, 2026, so the applicable plan depends on deployment timing.

H2 Database Engine is a free SQL database written in Java. It runs in embedded, server or mixed modes, with databases held on disk or in memory. H2 supports standard SQL and JDBC; server mode also accepts JDBC or ODBC over TCP/IP. A browser-based Console provides autocomplete. Listed database capabilities include transactions, multi-version concurrency and row-level locking, with JSON data support and high availability listed. Compatibility modes cover IBM DB2, Apache Derby, HSQLDB, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL. Database files can use AES-128 encryption, while remote JDBC connections can use TLS. H2 is available for Linux, macOS and Windows, as an API, and for self-hosted or web deployment. It is dual licensed under MPL 2.0 or EPL 1.0, allowing integration into and distribution with commercial applications. The JAR is described as around 2.5 MB. The plan costs nothing.