Convex

• CategoryRealtime / function-as-DB
• EngineJS-native
• PricingFreemium
• LicenseApache-2.0 (client) + Proprietary (server)
• Created2021
• GitHub stars1.4k
• PostgresNo
• Edge-readyNo

Bundled features: Realtime queries Functions-as-API File storage Auth

Convex is a JS-first reactive database where backend functions are the API surface. Queries are real-time by default, your React component re-renders when underlying data changes. Strong on type-safety, transactional consistency, and the full-stack TypeScript story.

• Real-time first apps (dashboards, multiplayer, collaborative)
• TypeScript-fluent teams that want backend functions as the only API
• Apps where the database-to-UI reactivity is the differentiator

Skip Convex for SQL-shaped workloads where Postgres is the natural fit. Skip if your team values portable data more than reactive convenience, Convex is its own data model.

Convex is genuinely interesting and well-built. The reactivity is real and the TypeScript story is excellent. The trade-off is portability, once you adopt Convex, the data model is non-trivial to migrate.

In most stacks you write a database schema, then an API layer, then client-side data fetching, then a cache with its own invalidation rules, and the bugs live in the seams between them. Convex collapses that. Backend functions are the API surface, queries are deterministic and automatically subscribed, and mutations are transactional. When a mutation changes data a query depends on, every subscribed client updates. There is no revalidation strategy to design because there is nothing to invalidate. Types flow end to end without a code-generation step, so renaming a field surfaces as a compile error in the component that used it. File storage and auth come from the same platform, so a real-time dashboard or a multiplayer editing surface loses weeks of the plumbing which usually makes those products expensive to build. It is a coherent design rather than a pile of features.

The client is Apache-2.0 and the server side is proprietary, and more importantly the data model is Convex's own rather than SQL. That has consequences beyond licensing. Your analytics people cannot point a BI tool at it the way they would at Postgres. Your queries are functions, not statements, so there is no equivalent of handing someone a dump and a schema and having them productive an hour later. And leaving is not a migration, it is a rewrite of every data-access path in the application. That is a fair trade when reactivity is the differentiator of your product and you would otherwise build it by hand. It is a bad trade if you picked Convex for developer experience on a fundamentally relational application, because you paid permanent portability cost for convenience Postgres tooling would also have given you.

• Official homepage →
• GitHub repo →

The 30-min call is where your database choice becomes a real architecture, a migration plan if you are switching, and a price range you can take to your stakeholders. Describe your stack, your scale, your data shape. I tell you whether Convex is genuinely your fit.