Kimberlite

Kimberlite
vs TigerBeetle

Shared DNA, different missions.

Feature Comparison Architecture

TigerBeetle and Kimberlite share design philosophy: deterministic simulation testing, immutable logs, and formal verification approaches. TigerBeetle is a purpose-built financial accounting database. Kimberlite is a general-purpose compliance database for any regulated industry.

When to Use Each

TigerBeetle

High-throughput double-entry accounting, financial ledgers, payment processing

Financial accounting — Double-entry ledger with ACID transfers
Extreme throughput — Millions of transfers/sec with io_uring
Purpose-built API — Optimized for create_transfers and create_accounts

Kimberlite

Any regulated data across healthcare, finance, legal, government, education, and defense

Any regulated data — Healthcare, legal, government, education, defense, pharma
Full SQL queries — SELECT, JOIN, CTE, aggregates, GROUP BY, HAVING, UNION
23 compliance frameworks — HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and 18 more

Feature Comparison

A side-by-side comparison of capabilities relevant to regulated data workloads.

Feature TigerBeetle Kimberlite
Purpose Financial accounting ledger General-purpose compliance database
Query language Custom binary protocol only Full SQL (JOINs, CTEs, subqueries, aggregates)
Industry coverage Finance only Healthcare, finance, legal, government, education, pharma
Compliance frameworks None built-in 23 frameworks formally verified
Simulation testing VOPR (deterministic simulation) VOPR (46 scenarios, 19 invariant checkers)
Performance io_uring, millions of ops/sec Hardware-accelerated crypto, zero-copy frames
Data model Fixed schema (accounts + transfers) User-defined schemas with SQL DDL
Multi-tenancy Not built-in Built-in with ABAC policies
Consensus VSR (Viewstamped Replication) VSR (Viewstamped Replication)
License Apache 2.0 Apache 2.0

Architecture

How each database approaches data storage and integrity.

TigerBeetle: Accounting Ledger

TigerBeetle is a specialized financial database with a fixed schema of accounts and transfers. It achieves extreme performance through io_uring and a purpose-built binary protocol. Not designed for general-purpose queries.

Kimberlite: Compliance Database

Kimberlite is a general-purpose database for any regulated data. User-defined schemas, full SQL, 23 compliance frameworks, and multi-tenant isolation. Designed for auditability across all industries.

Other Comparisons

Evaluate Kimberlite

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Install Documentation