What you get with CrateDB OSS

CrateDB OSS is the full core engine, the same distributed SQL database that powers CrateDB Cloud and CrateDB Enterprise. There is no feature-limited community edition. You get the complete query engine, all six data models, horizontal scalability, and the PostgreSQL wire protocol, free to use under the Apache 2.0 license.

All data models
Time-series, JSON, relational, vector, full-text, and geospatial: query across all of them in a single SQL statement. 

Distributed SQL engine
Shared-nothing architecture, parallel query execution, automatic sharding, and horizontal scalability out of the box.

PostgreSQL wire protocol
Connect with any PostgreSQL-compatible client, driver, or BI tool. No proprietary query language to learn.

Auto-indexing
Data is indexed automatically on ingestion and queryable within milliseconds. No manual index tuning required.

High-throughput ingest
Ingest millions of records per second from streaming sources, batch imports, and Kafka, without batch delays before querying.

Community support
CrateDB OSS is backed by the community forum. Official support with SLAs is available with CrateDB Cloud and CrateDB Enterprise.

When CrateDB OSS is the right choice

OSS is not just a trial tier. It runs real production workloads. But running it well requires your team to own the full operational stack: provisioning, monitoring, tuning, backup scheduling, version upgrades, and incident response. If your team has that capability and wants that control, OSS is the right choice.

Good fit
Self-managed production on your own infrastructure
Your team handles cluster provisioning, performance monitoring, backup scheduling, version upgrades, and incident response. You want full control and have the expertise to exercise it.

Good fit
Prototyping and local development
Spin up a single-node cluster on your laptop in seconds and build against the full engine. When you are ready for production, CrateDB Cloud and Enterprise run the same engine with no changes to your code or data model.

Consider CrateDB Enterprise instead
You want infrastructure control but less operational burden
You want infrastructure control but less operational burden. CrateDB Enterprise adds tooling for automation, migration, and observability without giving up control over where your data lives.

Consider CrateDB Cloud instead
You want none of those operational responsibilities
You want none of the operational responsibilities. CrateDB Cloud handles provisioning, scaling, backups, upgrades, and incident response, with official support included.

Get started in minutes

Step 1: Run with Docker

docker run -p 4200:4200 -p 5432:5432 crate

The admin UI opens at localhost:4200. You can run your first SQL query in under 30 seconds. For bare-metal, Kubernetes, or other environments, see the installation guide.

Step 2: Connect your tools

CrateDB speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol. Any PostgreSQL client — psql, DBeaver, Grafana, SQLAlchemy — connects without a driver change. Native drivers are available for Python, Java, Node.js, Go, and others.

Step 3: Read the docs and join the community

The documentation covers installation, data modeling, ingestion, and query patterns.

The community forum is the fastest path to an answer from people running CrateDB in production. It is the only support channel available with OSS. If your team requires a response SLA, see CrateDB Cloud or Enterprise support plans.