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nookdb

NookDB vs Jazz

Pick Jazz if…

  • You want multi-device sync out of the box without building a backend yourself.
  • Your app is full-stack and you want one framework to span client, server, and the space in between.
  • CRDT-based conflict resolution fits your collaborative data model.

Pick NookDB if…

  • Your app runs on a single machine and never needs to merge changes from another device.
  • You want no cloud dependency in the critical path — not even a relay server.
  • You think in typed schemas, not CRDT documents.

Where they overlap

Both Jazz and NookDB are “local-first” in the practical sense that they store data on the user’s machine and let the UI read from that local store without a round-trip to a server. Both treat developer experience seriously: Jazz ships a full TypeScript SDK; NookDB ships a schema DSL where every field type is reflected in the query return type. If you care about keeping data close to the user and not paying per-query latency, both projects share that philosophy.

What’s genuinely different

Jazz is a distributed system at heart. Its CRDT layer is designed for the reality that the same document may be edited on a phone, a laptop, and a web app simultaneously, and those edits need to merge without losing data. That is powerful, but it comes with a required network topology — Jazz Cloud or a self-hosted relay. NookDB makes the opposite bet: no network, no merge, one machine. The storage layer is a Rust B-tree with append-only writes and crash-safe recovery. If your Electron app is the only writer, that simplicity is a feature.

— Ömer, Nookwright