--- title: RethinkDB Reviews meta_title: 'RethinkDB Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 15 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how RethinkDB works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.3 review_count: 15 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-05-05' parent_category: name: NoSQL Databases url: https://www.g2.com/categories/nosql-databases --- # RethinkDB Reviews **Vendor:** The Linux Foundation **Category:** [Document Databases](https://www.g2.com/categories/document-databases) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 15 ## About RethinkDB RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn. ## RethinkDB Reviews ### 1. You can listen to changes and trigger code based on these changes. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2020 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** It has some good features like built in change notification system to users application . **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** Rethinkdb Cannot run queries from its CLI. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** Unlike a lot of other databases where if the master is down the system is down, this one if the master is down someone else is made master so much more peer to peer. ### 2. Quality scalable and easy-to-use database **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James R. | CTO and Co-Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2018 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** ReQL, RethinkDB's query language is one of my absolute favourite things it offers. As someone who isn't very fond of generic SQL databases, ReQL feels just like programming, and I don't have to shift mind-sets to think about another language. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** Unfortunately, RethinkDB is no longer actively developed, and was the company behind RethinkDB officially shut down in October 2016. The project has since joined The Linux Foundation and has seen one update in mid-2017, but the future for RethinkDB isn't looking too positive currently. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** RethinkDB is a great database engine, but be wary of the fact that its release cycle has slowed down drastically since moving to The Linux Foundation. We're hoping that this improves in 2018, but are starting to discuss internally about its viability in the next few years. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** RethinkDB's powers all of our database needs in our business. From managing customer game servers, to running our entire OAuth 2.0 API, RethinkDB is behind it all. Its real-time queries have been a godsend for managing real-time data with game servers and other aspects of our API. ### 3. A young user-friendly and featureful Database but... **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alexandre C. | Senior Go Engineer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** First what I like best is the transparency of the RethinkDB team and its dedication to make RethinkDB a user-friendly product. The website is full of information about the current bugs and performance issues. And there is a real effort to make the product very user-friendly: a nice documentation, a beautiful UI, a clean and well-thought API, simple sharding and replication features, joins, real-time features... It really has lots of attractive features for such a young product. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** RethinkDB is still quite slow for many operations. I know a Swiss start-up that switched from RethinkDB to PostgreSQL because of performance issues. These problems could be fixed in the future but if you need good performance right now at the very least do some benchmark and load-testing before investing too much in this database. Also using RethinkDB made me realize that I prefer databases that use a text-based query language (SQL databases, Cassandra, Redis, ...) than databases that use a Javascript API by default (MongoDB, RethinkDB, ...) because: - drivers in other languages are easier to implement when you just have to send some tex queriest than when you have to mimic the Javascript API. - Javascript is a very dynamic language and it is sometimes hard to mimic the Javascript API in other languages, especially in compiled ones. It makes the API in all languages different, so you first have to learn the Javascript API and then you have to look how to do it in your language. The languages in the official documentation are JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Java. So be careful if you are not using one of these languages. - It makes unit tests more difficult to do. A database with a large API containing plenty of functions is harder to mock than a SQL database with a leaner API. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** Do benchmarks for your use. Think twice if you are not using JavaScript, Python, Ruby or Java. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used RethinkDB on small personal projects and have not used it in production. ### 4. Great multi-purpose database **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Taylor M. | Director of Data Procurement, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** There a ton of things to like about RethinkDB. Of particular interest are the query language which feels just like programming. I'm a big fan of the community around it because they've very welcoming and supportive as well. It's well designed and everything is done out in the open which builds a lot of trust and understanding. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** One downside is that using the in-browser data explorer requires you to write your queries in JavaScript. I do most of my analysis in Python so the conversion can be a pain sometimes. It'd be nice to be able to write Python in the browser but I understand the challenges of making that a reality. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** Reach out to them on their Slack channel and via GitHub. They're very friendly and helpful! **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're working to bring efficiency and transparency to the genetic testing industry. RethinkDB powers our internal data pipeline that ingests massive amounts of laboratory data, standardizes it to industry-specific terms, and formats in a clinically-relevant and hierarchical manner. One of the many nice things about RethinkDB is that it allows us to be flexible about what data we're capturing as well as enables us to transform it into a myriad number of ways quickly and on the fly. It's a lot of fun to use and it just works! ### 5. Powerful database **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh V. | Senior Software Engineer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** I LOVE the automatic replication and sharding features in RethinkDB. It's so incredibly simple, and the web UI does a fantastic job of letting you know what's happening with your cluster. The realtime updates make everything feel very refined. I also enjoy how easy it is to interact with RethinkDB from a variety of tools. I've used RethinkDB primarily with Python, but I've also dabbled with some of the other drivers. The fairly consistent interface is very helpful. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** The last time I paid attention, RethinkDB used significantly more disk space than some other solutions that I evaluated at the same time with the same dataset. This was several years ago now. Disk consumption is a lot better now, but it's still more than I would prefer. Data ingestion speed wasn't quite what I had hoped when I benchmarked it recently. This was in a small-scale test environment, though, and I'm sure a proper environment would perform much better. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** I have recommended RethinkDB to several of my peers over the years, and I absolutely continue to recommend that others give RethinkDB a solid look. It didn't perform well enough for my needs when I evaluated it, but I intend to re-evaluate it in the near future. I'm excited to see how the newer realtime features can improve my products. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used RethinkDB to store additional information for things that lived in a MySQL. RethinkDB helped me to finalize a schema for my normal data, leaving more interesting information in RethinkDB. ### 6. Great team behind RethinkDB **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel C. | Software Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** My favourite features of RethinkDB are the team behind it, the real time features, and the query language. The RethinkDB team are the nicest group I have ever worked with in open source. They are patient, responsive, kind, and friendly. When reporting bugs and writing patches they are great to work with. The real time queries are a breakthrough, and make writing real-time apps much easier than before. I also really like the query language. It is a functional query language which works well with the functional programming language we are using to talk to RethinkDB (Clojure). **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** I don't really have any dislikes of RethinkDB. It is a document database, so you don't have SQL features like multi document transactions and schemas, but you would get that with any database. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** If you need a document database, I would seriously look at RethinkDB. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** The realtime queries are the biggest win for us. They let us get realtime updates into our web application with minimal effort. ### 7. I have been using RethinkDB in the last month for a work project. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Carlos L. | Software Developer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** Rethink is an easy to setup and easy to use NoSQL database that I started to use for a project in my work. The main feature that made use choose Rethink instead of other well known NoSQL database was the change feed that was crucial for the project goal. I found that the installation and usage of RethinkDb was extremely easy to a beginner with no experience in NoSQL databases. And even with a standard installation we begun doing some really intensive work and Rethink was able to handle the load extremely well. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** I disliked that to use the database I had to manually create a connection inside a Python terminal. The lack of a more easy interaction with the data in the web admin. The only option is to interact with the data using Javascript which me being a Python developer is not really easy. So I'm forced to do any data manipulation through a Python terminal. But that being said, that manipulation is really more easy than with SQL database. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** Is really easy to start working with RethinkDB if you have experience with Linux and Python. Just be sure that you comfortable with doing data manipulation via the Python terminal. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm solving a problem with a web application that needs to monitor and display any change into the RethinkDB, so the change feed option is really great for keeping an eye into insertions and updates. ### 8. One of the revolutionary design in database technology **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shahid S. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** Real time updates using changes() syntax. We can use this feature to do most of the real time processing with less latency possible. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** It requires like minimum 2GB to run and i have seen some issue of memory leak too. Although its still evolving so we can expect these for now. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** Try to use changes() function as much as you can if you are developing the real time application. ReQL query language is indeed the advanced and quite useful to perform SQL like operation in NoSQL database. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am developing API engine in micro service architecture. For event store to make API"s communicate we used Redis and Socket.io and we do polling to get the information. Now with this, for any change i am going to get the information pushed to my Server :) ### 9. Rethink DB review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dusko J. | Python/Javascript, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** The query language is amazing compared to other NoSQL query languages. I have only used MongoDB and Redis and compared to MongoDB, the query language is absolutely superb. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** The fact that it lacks atomic updates across multiple documents. This is the sole reason why we have switched to Postgres: Our data model became so much simpler once we could rely on transparent transactions. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** Although it's much easier to use than other NoSQL databases, it's still falls behind Postgres for situations where you need more than one record updated atomically. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used RethinkDB to model a document editor backend. ### 10. My RethinkDB Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** The way you get to query the database. It is absolutely brilliant. Being a fan of functional programming, it had been a god send to me. And then there is the real time change facilities although I dont use that much. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** Performance. The insertion, especially the batch insertion performance is rather slow. Also foubd it to be slower in geo queries compared to Mongo or Postgres with the same data. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** It has some performance issues, but it is gettibg improved with each upgrade. Other than that ut is a fantastic product. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** Notification system fora business automation system and a location database for a vehicle tracking system. I am storing vehicle's locations in realtime to RethinkDB and it gets queried by the browser and dropped to the map. Also nearest landmark queries are made. ### 11. Modern Query Language and Scales Well **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** RethinkDB raises the bar: it has a modern query language (i.e., it's very intuitive) and it scales well in enterprise (i.e., massively parallel distributed infrastructure). Also, RethinkDB is a must for realtime apps. A **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** Adoption isn't very widespread in industry, as in many developers I know tend to play it safe with MySQL. There are simply too many restrictions with which operations can be performed atomically that it can't be adopted for tier one services such as user/org, login, sessions, etc. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** RethinkDB definitely beats out other realtime DBs such as Firebase that are much less flexible. I think RethinkDB would work great for real time features within enterprise. It's much more intuitive than Mongo, so any situation in which I would consider Mongo, RethinkDB would definitely be in the talk. ### 12. Internal analytics and metrics tracking **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** I like that RethinkDB is open source, fast and declarative. It has a wonderful built in visualization tooling and works across many different server types. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** It is a new tech and has limited documentation, as well as very few people using it in production environments. **Recommendations to others considering RethinkDB:** Make sure that Rethink is the right tool for the job. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was creating simple analytic data streams from web events. As the product is still in development, most of my benefits are from the developer friendly nature of the platform - learning the query language, building tables, updating models are all simple tasks w/ RethinkDB ### 13. Excellent DB **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 23, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** The query language is a brilliant addition and functional style of fetching data works really well. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** Unfortunately at the time when I was using RethinkDB support for Windows was still lacking. I believe this is fixed now. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** The database works well in both strictly structured and not-so-strictly structured datasets. In case of proper number crunching and analytics this DB is probably not the best option. ### 14. I have enjoyed working with rethinkdb and think it is a great choice for a lot of projects. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** The query language offers a ton of features, including advanced aggregations and transforms. **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** Since it is new, there are still some features that are immature or missing. One big one is an authentication system. **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I had a need for a fast database that could handle many transactions. I was able to put some things that would normally be the the application layer into the database. ### 15. RethinkDB review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vesa K. | Software Developer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2016 **What do you like best about RethinkDB?** Changefeeds in RethinkDB and easy-use are awesome **What do you dislike about RethinkDB?** I think performance should be little bit better **What problems is RethinkDB solving and how is that benefiting you?** I need realtime data from database so RethinkDB is best for that. - [View RethinkDB pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/rethinkdb/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-25+00%3A24%3A10+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=fc447efa-421a-41f0-a6a0-3d66f448f2b7&secure%5Btoken%5D=5cddc283e4d5b7ac6b66d3bd29fc589714289c73f29747110c6b31a16c283feb&format=llm_user) ## RethinkDB Features **Data Management** - Data Model - Data Types - Built - In Search - Event Triggers **Agentic AI - AWS Marketplace** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration **Availability** - Auto Sharding - Auto Recovery - Data Replication **Performance** - Query Optimization **Security** - Role-Based Authorization - Authentication - Audit Logs - Encryption **Support** - Multi-Model - Operating Systems - BI Connectors **Database Features** - Storage - Availability - Stability - Scalability - Security - Data Manipulation - Query Language ## Top RethinkDB Alternatives - [CouchDB](https://www.g2.com/products/couchdb/reviews) - 3.9/5.0 (59 reviews) - [Couchbase](https://www.g2.com/products/couchbase/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (142 reviews) - [Redis Software](https://www.g2.com/products/redis-software/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (130 reviews)