This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Nigro Simone
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 four approaches:
- pg-native brianc/node-postgres (C library bindings)
- pg brianc/node-postgres (standard JavaScript implementation)
- postgres.js porsager/postgres (standard JavaScript implementation)
- postgres.js porsager/postgres (unsafe mode used by some wrappers)
Source code at https://github.com/nigrosimone/postgres-benchmarks
Running benchmarks... --iterations=50000
GC is exposed
clk: ~3.37 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) 162.75 µs/iter 154.46 µs █
(113.08 µs … 1.12 ms) 429.87 µs █▆
( 7.07 kb … 2.87 mb) 11.79 kb ▁██▄▂▂▂▂▂▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▁▁▁▁
brianc/node-postgres (pg) 172.63 µs/iter 180.84 µs █
(126.98 µs … 1.15 ms) 432.69 µs ▃█
(376.00 b … 3.11 mb) 14.99 kb ██▆▅▃▃▃▂▃▂▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
porsager/postgres (postgres) 182.95 µs/iter 205.09 µs █
(126.69 µs … 1.16 ms) 449.84 µs █▇
( 2.26 kb … 980.01 kb) 11.69 kb ▁██▄▃▄▅▃▃▂▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
porsager/postgres (unsafe) 193.00 µs/iter 193.41 µs █
(143.72 µs … 1.14 ms) 547.31 µs █
( 6.77 kb … 517.28 kb) 9.30 kb ███▅▃▃▂▂▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
summary
brianc/node-postgres(pg-native)
1.06x faster than brianc/node-postgres (pg)
1.12x faster than porsager/postgres (postgres)
1.19x faster than porsager/postgres (unsafe)
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 (pg). Essentially, pg-native skips part of the JS-to-database abstraction cost.
pg Is Close Behind
Despite being pure JavaScript, pg remains very efficient and stable. The performance gap (~6%) 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 and postgres.js. However, the difference isn’t massive — your choice should balance performance, API design, and operational complexity.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Nigro Simone