No. 10 of 30 ·Database Proxy Software

PgCat

Linux · Self-hosted

Freedom report

Two barsScore 6.3

Free tierA free tier is on its own pricing page
Open codeNo open-source code on record
Runs widely1 of 6 device platforms
DocumentedPlans, terms and facts published

PgCat is ranked #10 of 30 in database proxy software on Freedom251. It runs on Linux, Self-hosted. There is a free plan.

PgCat plans and pricing

All plans

Open source Free MIT license · self-hosted github.com · 1 Oct 2026

Compared on database proxy software

Free plan: Yes
Deployment model: self-hosted
Connection pooling: Yes
Query routing: Yes
Load balancing: Yes
Automatic failover: Yes
Supported databases: PostgreSQL

Best PgCat alternatives

See all 12

Two bars MySQL Free tier No. 1Free6.6 Two bars OceanBase Database Free tier No. 2Free6.5 Two bars PgDog Free tier No. 3Free6.5 One bar PgBouncer Free tier No. 4Free6.4 Two bars ShardingSphere-Proxy Free tier No. 5Free6.4 One bar TiCDC Free tier No. 6Free6.4

The record

Purpose: PgCat is a PostgreSQL pooler and proxy supporting sharding, load balancing, failover and mirroring.
Pooling: Transaction pooling and session pooling are stable features.
Runtime: PgCat uses Tokio’s asynchronous runtime and a multithreaded design for multicore machines.
Read balancing: Read queries can be automatically load balanced between replicas and the primary.
Failover: Broken replicas are detected with health checks and queries are rerouted to remaining servers.
Sharding: Extended SQL syntax, comment parsing and automatic sharding are experimental features.
Mirroring: Mirroring is an experimental feature that sends queries to multiple databases for testing or replica prewarning.
Monitoring: Pooler statistics are available through the pgcat and pgbouncer admin databases and through a Prometheus HTTP endpoint.
Security: Clients and PostgreSQL servers can use SSL/TLS, and authentication supports MD5 and SCRAM-SHA-256 connections.
Authentication: MD5 auth passthrough can use auth_query so cleartext passwords are not required in the configuration file.
Deployment: The project documents Docker deployment and publishes ghcr.io/postgresml/pgcat:latest.
Transaction-mode limit: Transaction mode is enabled by default and does not support prepared statements, SET or advisory locks.
Production status: The project says PgCat is stable and used in production to serve hundreds of thousands of queries per second.
License: PgCat is free and open source under the MIT license.
Price from: Free

Where it ranks on Freedom251

Best Database Proxy Software in 2026#10 of 30

Is PgCat yours?

Claim it for free: prove the domain, then correct facts, plans and screenshots. An editor reviews every change.

Claim it free Promote PgCat

Sources

github.com/postgresml/pgcat· checked 1 Oct 2026
postgresml.org/about· checked 1 Oct 2026