head to head · open source
dbx vs pgdog
dbx has 28,664 GitHub stars, 2,616 forks, 1,406 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pgdog has 5,594 stars, 310 forks, 208 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dbx leads on adoption by 412% (28,664 vs 5,594 stars). dbx is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; pgdog is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. dbx has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, pgdog 6%. pgdog was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (postgresql), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| dbx | pgdog | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 5.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 310 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick dbx if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pgdog if
- You want the pgdog feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and pgdog fits your workflow better
About dbx
90+ databases in 25 MB. Desktop, Docker, CLI, built in AI assistant, and MCP Server. <img src="
About pgdog
PgDog is an open source proxy for scaling PostgreSQL. It supports connection pooling, load balancing queries and sharding entire databases. Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage thousands of connections on commodity hardware. Documentation & 128216; PgDog documentation can be found here . Any questions? Chat with us on Discord . Enterprise edition & 127970; Enterprise edition (EE) documentation is available here . Changelog is available here . Quick start Kubernetes Helm chart is here . To install it, run: AWS If you're using AWS RDS, you can deploy PgDog using one of two supported methods: 1…
read the full pgdog overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is dbx or pgdog more popular?
dbx has 28,664 GitHub stars and pgdog has 5,594. dbx has the larger community by that measure.
Are dbx and pgdog free?
Both are open source. dbx is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pgdog under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dbx and pgdog?
dbx is written in Rust and pgdog in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, dbx or pgdog?
Choose dbx if you want the larger community (28,664 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pgdog if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.