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Nigro Simone
Nigro Simone

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Benchmarking PostgreSQL Drivers in Node.js: node-postgres vs postgres.js, who is the faster?

#node #javascript #postgres

TLTR: pg-native wins

When building high-performance Node.js applications with PostgreSQL, choosing the right driver can have a noticeable impact on query latency and throughput. To compare the most popular options, we ran a benchmark using mitata to test three libraries:

Source code at https://github.com/nigrosimone/postgres-benchmarks

Running benchmarks... --iterations=50000
GC is exposed
Poll size: 10
Dependencies versions:
{
  "pg": "^8.16.3",
  "pg-native": "^3.5.2",
  "postgres": "^3.4.7"
}
Database connectivity verified
clk: ~3.06 GHz
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz
runtime: node 24.7.0 (x64-linux)

benchmark                       avg (min … max) p75 / p99    (min … top 1%)
----------------------------------------------- -------------------------------
brianc/node-postgres (pg-native) 161.73 µs/iter 159.26 µs   █
                          (113.45 µs … 1.01 ms) 391.13 µs   █
                        (  6.93 kb …   2.07 mb)  11.93 kb ▁▄█▆▃▂▂▂▂▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁

brianc/node-postgres (pg)        183.02 µs/iter 197.19 µs  █
                          (129.61 µs … 1.77 ms) 402.29 µs  █▅▃
                        (  1.80 kb …   1.93 mb)  15.46 kb ▁███▆▅▅▄▃▃▂▂▂▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁

porsager/postgres (postgres)     202.32 µs/iter 220.90 µs  █
                          (140.51 µs … 1.22 ms) 436.25 µs  █▆▄
                        (  4.90 kb …   1.10 mb)  13.97 kb ▁████▇▆▄▃▃▃▂▂▂▂▁▁▁▁▁▁

summary
  brianc/node-postgres (pg-native)
   1.13x faster than brianc/node-postgres (pg)
   1.25x faster than porsager/postgres (postgres)
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pg-native wins

The pg-native driver leverages libpq, the official PostgreSQL C client library. This allows faster query parsing, lower overhead on network I/O, and better memory handling than the pure JavaScript implementation. Essentially, pg-native skips part of the JS-to-database abstraction cost.

pg is close behind

Despite being pure JavaScript, pg (AKA node-postgres) remains very efficient and stable. The performance gap is small and might not be noticeable in real-world apps unless you're processing tens of thousands of queries per second.

Conclusion

For high-throughput Node.js applications where microseconds matter, pg-native consistently outperforms both pg (AKA node-postgres) and postgres (AKA postgres.js). However, the difference isn’t massive — your choice should balance performance, API design, and operational complexity.

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