Google Cloud Spanner vs YDB
Google Cloud Spanner
cloud.google.comYDB
ydb.techSide by side
| Figure | Google Cloud Spanner | YDB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 4 |
| Spec score · Distributed SQL Databases | 8.3 (#10) | 7.3 (#17) |
| Analytics | Its columnar engine supports ad hoc analytics on live data, and it integrates with BigQuery for federated queries. | YDB provides columnar tables and a distributed vectorized query engine for analytical workloads. |
| Compliance | Google lists ISO 27001, SOC 2, and HIPAA among Spanner’s certifications and compliance credentials. | YDB states that its security features help meet requirements including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001. |
| Deployment | Spanner Omni is a downloadable version that can run on-premises, across clouds, or on a laptop. | YDB can be deployed on premises and on virtual machines with Ansible, or in cloud environments with Kubernetes. |
| Integrations | Google documents integrations with Cloud Run, Dataflow, Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, GKE, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, and Looker. | The integrations documentation lists DBeaver, DataGrip, Grafana, Apache Airflow, Apache Spark, Kafka API, dbt, SQLAlchemy, and LangChain among supported integrations. |
| Scaling | Spanner provides horizontal read and write scalability, automatic database sharding, and geo-partitioning. | YDB automatically shards and rebalances data, and compute and storage can scale independently. |
| Security | Spanner provides encryption in transit, identity and access controls, and security controls under a shared responsibility model. | YDB supports internal users and external users from directory services such as LDAP and IAM, along with user and group access rights. |
| Support | Google lists support packages, Stack Overflow, online help communities, and bug or feature requests as support options for Spanner instances. | Commercial support offers a Basic 8×5 ticket service and an Advanced 24×7 service through tickets, chat, and videoconferencing. |
| Transactions | Spanner provides strong transactional consistency and describes its transactions as Strong-ACID with TrueTime ordering. | YDB supports global ACID transactions and strong consistency. |
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
YDB
- Managed YDB ServerlessFree
- Open-SourceFree
- EnterprisePriced on request
- Managed YDB DedicatedPriced on request
In their own words
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.
YDB
YDB is an open-source distributed SQL database for OLTP, OLAP and streaming workloads. It provides global ACID transactions, strong consistency, automatic sharding and rebalancing, and independent scaling for compute and storage. Columnar tables and a distributed vectorized query engine support analytics. YDB Topics supports Kafka API 3.4.0, exactly-once delivery and automatic partitioning. A native vector index handles approximate nearest-neighbor queries for semantic search, recommendations and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. Deployments can run on premises, on virtual machines with Ansible, or in cloud environments with Kubernetes. Security includes internal and directory-based external users, plus user and group rights. Integrations listed include DBeaver, DataGrip, Grafana, Airflow, Spark, Kafka API, dbt, SQLAlchemy and LangChain. Open-Source costs nothing under Apache 2.0. Managed Serverless is also free, usage-billed with monthly free allowances.