Fauna
discontinuedby Fauna, Inc. · since 2017 · also known as FaunaDB, Fauna DB
Former serverless document-relational database with global strong consistency; shut down May 30, 2025.
discontinued. Fauna's hosted service shut down on May 30, 2025; source was released under Apache 2.0 but is unmaintained. Migrate to e.g. MongoDB Atlas, DynamoDB, Neon or Convex.
Overview
Fauna was a serverless, globally distributed database that combined JSON documents with relational features such as joins, indexes and foreign-key-like references, queried through its own FQL language over HTTPS. Its Calvin-inspired transaction protocol gave strictly serializable transactions across regions without the application managing replicas, and it was popular with Jamstack and edge developers. In March 2025 the company announced it would wind down; the hosted service was switched off on May 30, 2025 and remaining data was deleted. Fauna published the core database source under Apache 2.0, but there is no maintained distribution or community release. Treat it as discontinued and migrate to another serverless database.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- +Strictly serializable global transactions without managing replicas (historically)
- +Released source is a useful reference implementation of Calvin-style transactions
Trade-offs
- −Service shut down; all hosted data was deleted after May 30, 2025
- −Proprietary FQL made migrations hard
- −Released source has no maintained builds, docs or community
Great for
- +Historical reference only
- +Studying deterministic distributed transaction design
Think twice for
- −Any production workload: the service no longer exists
Capabilities
Native or official first-party support · 12 of 25 tracked
Scale & consistency
- Comfortable data size
- Medium · ≤ 10 TB
- Horizontal scaling
- Native
- Multi-region
- Active active
- Transactions
- Full ACID
- Consistency
- Strong
- Schema
- Flexible
- Architecture
- Serverless, Distributed
- Query languages
- FQL
Historically replicated globally with Calvin-style deterministic transactions; no longer operated.
Deployment
Ecosystem
Alternatives to Fauna
MongoDB's own multi-cloud DBaaS, bundling search, vector search and stream processing.
fauna vs mongodb-atlas →AWS's serverless key-value and document store with single-digit-millisecond reads at any scale.
fauna vs amazon-dynamodb →Reactive TypeScript backend with a transactional document database, server functions and live queries.
fauna vs convex →Serverless Postgres with copy-on-write branching and scale-to-zero, now part of Databricks.
fauna vs neon →Rust multi-model database (documents, graph, vectors, live queries) that runs embedded, in WASM or clustered.
fauna vs surrealdb →Serverless document database with realtime listeners, offline SDKs and a new Enterprise edition.
fauna vs google-cloud-firestore →Fauna FAQ
What is Fauna?
Fauna is a document database by Fauna, Inc., first released in 2017. Fauna was a serverless, globally distributed database that combined JSON documents with relational features such as joins, indexes and foreign-key-like references, queried through its own FQL language over HTTPS. Its Calvin-inspired transaction protocol gave strictly serializable transactions across regions without the application managing replicas, and it was popular with Jamstack and edge developers. In March 2025 the company announced it would wind down; the hosted service was switched off on May 30, 2025 and remaining data was deleted. Fauna published the core database source under Apache 2.0, but there is no maintained distribution or community release. Treat it as discontinued and migrate to another serverless database.
Is Fauna open source?
Yes. Fauna is open source. License: Apache License 2.0 (source released 2025).
Does Fauna support ACID transactions?
Yes. Fauna supports full ACID transactions, with strong consistency.
Does Fauna scale horizontally?
Fauna scales horizontally out of the box, with built-in sharding or partitioning. It is comfortable at medium scale (≤ 10 TB). It supports active-active multi-region writes.
What is Fauna best for?
Fauna is a strong fit for historical reference only and studying deterministic distributed transaction design. Think twice for any production workload: the service no longer exists.
What are the best alternatives to Fauna?
Common alternatives to Fauna include MongoDB Atlas, Amazon DynamoDB, Convex, Neon and SurrealDB. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.
Is Fauna still maintained?
Fauna is discontinued. Fauna's hosted service shut down on May 30, 2025; source was released under Apache 2.0 but is unmaintained. Migrate to e.g. MongoDB Atlas, DynamoDB, Neon or Convex.
How popular is Fauna?
Fauna ranks #330 of 844 databases on the WhichDB Score (8.1/100), and #31 among document databases. The score combines public adoption signals such as package downloads, GitHub activity, job posts and developer discussion.