--- title: Google Cloud Spanner Reviews meta_title: 'Google Cloud Spanner Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 36 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Google Cloud Spanner works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.2 review_count: 36 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-07' parent_category: name: Database Software url: https://www.g2.com/categories/database-software --- # Google Cloud Spanner Reviews **Vendor:** Google **Category:** [Relational Databases](https://www.g2.com/categories/relational-databases) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 36 ## About Google Cloud Spanner The first horizontally scalable, strongly consistent, relational database service ## Google Cloud Spanner Reviews ### 1. GcS **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Priya A. | Security Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2022 **What do you like best about Google Cloud Spanner?** SQL database management and wide storage **What do you dislike about Google Cloud Spanner?** Consistency of GCS should be more stronger **Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Spanner:** Start at any size and scale with no limits **What problems is Google Cloud Spanner solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps in unlimited scalability and availablity ### 2. Cloud Spanner - Positives and Negatives **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 09, 2019 **What do you like best about Google Cloud Spanner?** It is a distributed SQL and is consistent. It doesn't use nodes for storage and data is stored as files giving the strong consistency as opposed to eventual consistency provided by other NoSQL databases. **What do you dislike about Google Cloud Spanner?** It doesn't have basic functions like RANK() which is essential for any database. When I tried exploring it, it didn't have a way to export the data. Also, it is a bit expensive **What problems is Google Cloud Spanner solving and how is that benefiting you?** I tried Google Cloud Spanner for one of the Proof of Concepts. I decided not to go for it for the things I mentioned in the "What do you dislike" section. ### 3. Google Cloud Spanner Review **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jill H. | Assistant Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2019 **What do you like best about Google Cloud Spanner?** Strongly consistent scale-out RDBMS cluster: uses hardware assisted time synchronization to achieve data consistency. **What do you dislike about Google Cloud Spanner?** Cloud Spanner chooses an index automatically only in rare circumstances. In particular, Cloud Spanner does not automatically choose a secondary index if the query requests any columns that are not stored in the index. **What problems is Google Cloud Spanner solving and how is that benefiting you?** Interleaved tables: tables can have physical dependencies with each other. Rows of a child table can be collocated with rows of the parent table. This approach speeds up lookups of relations that can be defined in the data modeling phase—for example, collocation of customers and their invoices. ### 4. Robust and Reliable **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2019 **What do you like best about Google Cloud Spanner?** Scalability is a huge benefit and it has been very reliable under high workload. Built on widely and reliable distributed computing principles. Documentation and support are pretty solid. **What do you dislike about Google Cloud Spanner?** Replication is not configurable and can limit the ability to tailor it to specific needs. It's still catching up and the community is not as strong as other services and products. **Recommendations to others considering Google Cloud Spanner:** the tutorials and code snippets on the official documentation page are helpful to start with. **What problems is Google Cloud Spanner solving and how is that benefiting you?** Storing relational data for a mobile application that requires low latency and high consistency guarantees. ## Google Cloud Spanner Discussions - [How does Google Cloud Spanner work?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-does-google-cloud-spanner-work) - [What is GCP Cloud Spanner?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-gcp-cloud-spanner) - [What is spanner used for at Google?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-spanner-used-for-at-google) - [Which of the following are the features of Cloud Spanner?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/which-of-the-following-are-the-features-of-cloud-spanner) - [Could you please provide more information about the product and make it easily available so that all we get to know about this productuct](https://www.g2.com/discussions/could-you-please-provide-more-information-about-the-product-and-make-it-easily-available-so-that-all-we-get-to-know-about-this-productuct) - 1 upvote - [View Google Cloud Spanner pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-spanner/reviews?filters%5Bnps_score%5D%5B%5D=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-08+20%3A13%3A27+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=f5fb94db-8d11-4df0-9f4a-a51d40337646&secure%5Btoken%5D=99b3c02d302a5bfce7af57a36fe0376b30ae1f8853d62c9a72fe6f4445da35a6&format=llm_user) ## Google Cloud Spanner Features **Management ** - Data Schema - Query Language - ACID - Complaint - Data Replication **Configuration** - Application Performance - Orchestration - Database Monitoring - Anomaly Detection - Network Security **Support ** - Text Search - Data Types - Languages - Operating Systems **Database Administration** - Provisioning - Governance - Auditing **Security** - Database Locking - Access Control - Encryption - Authentication **Availability** - Scalability - Backup - Archiving - Indexing **Security** - Data Masking - Authentication And Single Sign-On - Data Anonymization **Performance ** - Disaster Recovery - Data Concurrency - Workload Management - Advanced Indexing - Query Optimizer **Data Management** - Data Replication - Advanced Data Analytics **Database Features** - Storage - Availability - Stability - Scalability - Security - Data Manipulation - Query Language ## Top Google Cloud Spanner Alternatives - [Amazon Aurora](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-aurora/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (437 reviews) - [Oracle Database](https://www.g2.com/products/oracle-database/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (935 reviews) - [PostgreSQL](https://www.g2.com/products/postgresql/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (651 reviews)