PgCat

PgCat is ranked #7 of 26 in database proxy software on The Geeks Club. It runs on Linux, Self-hosted. There is a free plan.

PgCat plans and pricing

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

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PgCat

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

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Where it ranks on The Geeks Club

Best Database Proxy Software in 2026#7 of 26

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Sources

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