RisingWave

Streaming database that maintains incremental materialised views in SQL instead of Flink jobs

As of 31 August 2026, RisingWave has a free plan and paid plans start at $0.227/hour. A Postgres-compatible streaming database where you define a materialised view in SQL and it stays continuously up to date from Kafka or CDC. Softwr lists it under Databases. RisingWave is made by RisingWave Labs, available on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud.

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Overview

What RisingWave does

RisingWave is a distributed stream processing system presented as a database. You connect a source such as Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis or a Postgres CDC stream, write a CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW statement, and the engine keeps that view incrementally up to date, computing only the delta as events arrive. Results can be queried directly over the Postgres wire protocol or sunk back out to Kafka, Iceberg, ClickHouse or a warehouse. The distinguishing decision is the interface. Apache Flink is the incumbent for this work and requires a Java or Scala codebase, a job manager, checkpointing configuration and a team that understands operator state. RisingWave replaces that with SQL and a Postgres connection, which puts streaming transformations within reach of analytics engineers rather than a dedicated streaming team. State is persisted to object storage rather than local disk, so recovery is a matter of restarting nodes rather than restoring large local checkpoints. The core is Apache 2.0 and self-hostable, but the commercial model puts a set of premium features behind a licence key and the managed cloud is billed per RisingWave Unit hour starting at 0.227 US dollars. Buyers are teams that already have Kafka and want continuously fresh aggregations without hiring streaming engineers. The trade-off is expressiveness: complex event processing, custom windowing and stateful logic that does not fit SQL still belongs in Flink.

What people use it for

A team with Kafka topics that needs continuously fresh aggregates for a dashboard without standing up a Flink cluster
A fraud or risk team maintaining rolling counters and joins across event streams expressed as SQL views
A company doing Postgres CDC into a real-time denormalised view for search or serving
An analytics group that wants streaming results landed directly into Apache Iceberg without a separate writer job

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about RisingWave.

Anything that does not fit SQL, such as custom windowing, complex event processing or heavy stateful logic, still needs Flink, so RisingWave often adds a system rather than removing one.
The Apache 2.0 community edition excludes premium features behind a licence key, and which capabilities sit on which side of that line moves between releases, so a self-hosted plan can be invalidated by an upgrade.
Long-running materialised views accumulate state in object storage, and cost and recovery time grow with retention in ways that are hard to forecast before you are in production.
The Postgres compatibility is protocol level; it is not a transactional Postgres and using it as a general purpose database, with point updates or high write concurrency, goes badly.
It is a comparatively young venture-funded project competing with Flink, Materialize and warehouse-native streaming, and the ecosystem of connectors, operators and third-party expertise is much thinner.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of RisingWave

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

RisingWavevs
Materialize
Materialize: If you want the same incremental view model with stronger consistency guarantees and a more mature commercial story
RisingWavevs
Apache Flink
Apache Flink: If your logic exceeds SQL and you have or can hire streaming engineers
RisingWavevs
Tinybird
Tinybird: If you want real-time analytics as an API rather than a streaming database you connect BI tools to

Pricing

What RisingWave costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Community Edition

Free

Apache 2.0 licence, self-hosted
Core streaming engine and connectors
Premium features excluded and require a licence key
Community support only

Cloud Basic

$0.227 /hour

Billed per RisingWave Unit hour
Hosted on AWS, GCP or Azure
Capped at 64 cores
Standard support and 7 day trial

Cloud Pro

On request

No core limit
Bring your own cloud option
Premium features included
Support with SLA, pay as you go or annual

Self-managed Enterprise

On request

On premises or Kubernetes
Premium features unlocked by licence
Annual contract with SLA
Quarterly success reviews

Capabilities

Features

SQL materialised views
Incrementally maintained results defined with standard CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW
Postgres wire compatibility
Existing psql clients, drivers and BI tools connect directly
Object storage state
Operator state persisted to S3 so recovery does not depend on local disk
Source connectors
Kafka, Pulsar, Kinesis, MQTT and Postgres or MySQL CDC ingestion
Sink connectors
Output to Kafka, Iceberg, ClickHouse, Snowflake, Redis and warehouses
Iceberg tables
Native writing of streaming results into Apache Iceberg
Watermarks and windowing
Event time processing with tumbling, hopping and session windows
User defined functions
Python, Java and JavaScript functions callable from streaming SQL

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is RisingWave open source?

The community edition is Apache 2.0 and self-hostable, but a set of premium features requires a paid licence key.

What does the cloud cost?

It starts at 0.227 US dollars per RisingWave Unit hour on the Basic tier, which is capped at 64 cores.

Does it replace Flink?

For SQL-expressible transformations, often yes. For custom stateful processing and complex event handling, no.

Can I query it like Postgres?

Yes over the Postgres wire protocol, but it is an analytical streaming engine, not a transactional database.

Keep looking

Where to go from RisingWave

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for RisingWave, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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