Deploy a free serverless alternative to Postgres in three clicks
Get the goodness of Postgres without its operational bottlenecks. Fauna takes care of provisioning, scaling, replication, maintenance, and other database operations so you can focus on building and delivering features.
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The goodness of Postgres without its operational bottlenecks
Postgres and Fauna are both relational databases, supporting serializable transactions, database normalization, foreign keys, indexes, constraints, stored procedures, and other typical relational features. But Fauna adds modern capabilities such as temporality, streaming, and multi-tenancy, a document-oriented API, and built-in support for GraphQL.
If you like Postgres, especially its transactional properties and battle-hardened reliability, but wish to minimize your operational burden, gain development flexibility, and free yourself from routine tasks such as data partitioning, replication, redundancy, etc. you may like Fauna even more!
Benefits of migrating from Postgres to Fauna
Document-relational
Fauna’s document-relational database enables you to store data as flexible, semi-structured documents while supporting relational capabilities you’re familiar with in Postgres like strong consistency, foreign keys, and joins.
Multi-region by default
Fauna is a multi-region database by default. It optimally routes requests to the closest region for low latency, has database replicas across multiple regions for redundancy against regional cloud failures, and provides region choice to help meet data residency requirements.
No connection pools
Fauna is accessed through an API call over HTTP and is stateless. You can call Fauna directly from FaaS functions like AWS Lambda or Cloudflare Workers and not worry about cold starts or connection pools. You can avoid the difficult performance tuning problems and degradation in performance experienced with Postgres connections w/ an API call in Fauna.
Simplify code, reduce costs and ship faster
Fauna combines the operational integrity and relational modeling of Postgres with a flexible interface and architecture that fits better with modern application development. Moreover, its serverless approach completely eliminates the provisioning and administrative tasks associated with cloud Postgres services.
Fauna Benefit | Comparison with Postgres |
---|---|
Freedom from ORM complexity | ORMs introduce significant application complexity, and make it difficult to use core Postgres features. Fauna’s document model is a more natural fit for modern applications, does not require ORMs, and still supports transactions, joins, relations, indexes, and views. |
Transparent and performant indexing | Query optimization in Postgres can be a dark art, and query plans can change at runtime in surprising ways. In Fauna, indexes are more like transactional views. They are composable and transparent and always make the query plan clear. |
Flexible schema design | Migrating a SQL schema can be a pain, especially when you aren’t sure of how your application is going to evolve. Fauna is schemaless, improving developer flexibility without giving up any of the core relational model. |
Serverless connection model | We are all familiar with the overhead of persistent Postgres connections and tools like PgBouncer that try to mitigate it. This model doesn’t work in a serverless and web-native world. Fauna uses stateless, secure HTTP connections with no cold start latency, connection management, or proxying problems. |
Better transactional isolation | Postgres defaults to read-committed isolation, which can result in correctness errors under concurrency. Even higher levels of isolation only apply to queries to the primary node. Fauna offers strict serializability--the highest possible isolation level--for every query, even in globally distributed deployments. |
Modern security model | Postgres has a complex set of security models that interact in surprising ways, and customer-level identity and access control is usually impractical--not to mention vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. Fauna has a web-native security model that is highly composable, secure by default, and integrates with popular cloud identity providers. |
Higher availability | Postgres’ primary/secondary replication creates performance bottlenecks, consistency issues, and single points of failure. Fauna’s semi-synchronous replication, inspired by Calvin, manages failures of the underlying infrastructure transparently for both reads and writes and guarantees optimal latency in any environment. |
Limitless scale | Postgres is a provisioned system, not an elastic one. Capacity planning takes time and often cost and scalability are in conflict. Fauna makes the database available as a Global API, not a provisioned resource. There are no resource limits and performance is predictable at any scale. |
No more operations | Many versions of Postgres exist in self-operated or managed cloud environments. All of them have different capabilities, upgrade cycles, and replication options to manage. Fauna is delivered as a Global API--always up to date, always backwards compatible, and always available. |
Built-in temporality | Although Postgres offers no way for the application to access record history. Fauna has built-in configurable temporality, letting you build time-travel and undo features, protect yourself from developer error, create audit logs, and capture change data for synchronization with other systems. |
Multi-tenancy | Multi-tenancy in Postgres requires extending every table with a tenancy key and does not offer any data or query isolation. Fauna has built-in recursive, secure, dynamically isolated multi-tenancy, making it easy to offer separation and customization to your customers, or to manage and secure usage within your organization. |
Native integrations with the tools you already use
AWS
Fauna leverages AWS to operate its global cloud infrastructure. Fauna integrates natively with AWS Lambda, EC2, ECS etc. to give you fast data access for your apps.
Google Cloud
Fauna leverages GCP to operate its global cloud infrastructure. Fauna integrates natively with GCE, Cloud Functions, GKE etc. to give you fast data access for your apps.
Microsoft Azure
Fauna integrates natively with Microsoft Azure compute services and Azure Functions to give you fast data access for your apps.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare workers enable developers to deploy serverless code instantly across the globe. Fauna integrates natively with Workers to give you fast data access at the edge.
Netlify
Netlify is a web developer platform that multiplies productivity. Fauna enables developers to easily add state to Jamstack applications hosted on Netlify.
Vercel
Vercel enables you to deploy any frontend application, especially those built on Next.js, instantly without configuration. Fauna makes it simple to add state to your Vercel apps.
Hear why our customers love Fauna
Will Kimbell, CTO/Architect, Connexin

Kevin Ho, Co-Founder & CEO, Insights.GG
Free Plan
For getting started with or learning Fauna. Explore all features and start building with free (forever) monthly capacity (100k read ops, 50k write ops, 500k compute ops, 5GB storage). Supported by community. Monthly limits enforced.
Annual (Save 10%)
 Monthly
Annual plans are billed upfront when you sign up, with on-demand usage charged monthly.
Individual
For professional developers building production applications
from $25/month
Capabilities
- Fauna core (FQL & GraphQL)
- Native authentication
- Built-in authorization (ABAC)
- Temporality (24 hour retention)
- Event streaming
- Multi-factor authentication
- Unlimited capacity
- Third party authentication
Quota (per month)
- $25 worth of usage
- Metered on-demand usage
Support
- Community
Team
For teams of developers building rich applications
from $150/month
Capabilities
- Features in the Individual plan
- Team management
- Temporality (7 day retention)
- Backup and restore
- Logging
Quota (per month)
- $150 worth of usage
- Metered on-demand usage
Support
- Helpdesk with 24 business hours response time
Business
For enterprise teams building full-featured, global applications
from $500/month
Capabilities
- Features in the Team plan
- Temporality (unlimited retention)
- Preview sandbox for live testing
Quota (per month)
- $500 worth of usage
- Metered on-demand usage
Support
- Helpdesk with 8 business hours response time
Virtual Private Fauna
Fauna running across your choice of geo and cloud
Custom Pricing
Capabilities
- All features of the Business Plan
- Choose your geography and cloud provider across one or multiple regions
- Single-tenant, VM level isolation
- Serverless experience, delivered via an API
Included capacity
- Configurable baseline
- On-demand usage above baseline
Support
- Premium support available
Ready to get started?
Sign up or get in touch with one of our experts and discover why thousands of developers love Fauna.