TigerBeetle vs. Postgres
TigerBeetle vs. Postgres for a financial ledger
Both can hold money. TigerBeetle is a single-purpose ledger database that does double-entry accounting, deterministic state machines, and 1M+ transfers per second on commodity hardware. Postgres is a relational generalist. The pick is honesty about what you actually need.
option ATigerBeetleoption BPostgresserviceCustom software engineering
→ Verdict
Pick TigerBeetle when you are building a real ledger · payments, exchanges, escrow, points, anything where double-entry, idempotent transfers and high throughput must be guaranteed by the database, not the app. Pick Postgres when ledger volume is modest (<2k tx/s steady), the schema is broader than money, and you do not want to operate a second OLTP system. Hybrid is fine: Postgres for product data, TigerBeetle for the money.
Pick a topic
When to pick which
A · Pick this when…
TigerBeetle
- 01True double-entry accounting where balances must never drift
- 02Tens of thousands to millions of transfers per second
- 03Idempotency, two-phase transfers, and history are first-class needs
- 04You can dedicate ops to a single-purpose database with replicas
- 05Audit and provenance are regulatory, not aspirational
B · Pick that when…
Postgres
- 01Ledger volume is modest, < 2k transfers/sec, with bursty peaks
- 02Money lives next to a wide schema (users, products, orders)
- 03Team has Postgres muscle and no operational budget for new infra
- 04You can encode debits and credits with care and a few constraints
- 05You are early enough that ledger may be a Stripe export, not infra
Factors to weigh
Factor-by-factor
| Factors to weigh | TigerBeetle | Postgres |
|---|---|---|
| Data model | Two types · accounts and transfers, fixed shape | Anything · arbitrary tables and joins |
| Throughput ceiling | 1M+ transfers/sec on a single cluster | Tens of thousands of small transactions/sec with care |
| Double-entry guarantees | Built in · the only operation is a balanced transfer | App-side · checks and triggers carry the burden |
| Determinism + replay | Yes · deterministic state machine, byte-for-byte replay | No · WAL replay yes, application determinism no |
| Operational maturity | Newer · narrower tooling, smaller hiring pool | Industrial · backups, replicas, observability everywhere |
| Schema flexibility | Rigid by design · evolve via app conventions | Highly flexible · migrations are normal |
| Reporting / analytics | Stream changes to a warehouse | Query in place, with caveats on hot tables |
| We recommend | Real ledgers at scale: payments, exchanges, escrow, points | Mixed-schema apps with modest ledger volume, Postgres-strong teams |
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