I Benchmarked LacertaDB & PouchDB — Here's What Happened

LacertaDB vs PouchDB: a head-to-head performance comparison of two browser-native document databases, and why your serializer matters more than you think. The Browser Database Problem Nobody Talks About Every browser database eventually hits the same wall: serialization . Your data has to be transformed before it hits IndexedDB, and transformed back when it comes out. Most libraries use JSON. Some use CBOR or MessagePack. The choice of serializer silently determines your throughput ceiling — and most developers never question it. I built LacertaDB to be the fastest browser-native document database possible. Along the way, I had to build its serializer from scratch too, because nothing on npm was fast enough or complete enough. Then I ran it against PouchDB — the established king of browser databases — to see where things actually stand. Here are the numbers. No cherry-picking, no synthetic micro-ops. Real document CRUD at scale. The Benchmark Setup Both databases ran identical workload