Nakama vs SpacetimeDB

A Game Server vs a Database That Runs the Game

Nakama follows the familiar three-tier shape. Clients talk to the Nakama server over sockets or request-response calls, the server runs built-in systems and the studio's custom runtime code, and state is stored in PostgreSQL or CockroachDB. A team adopting it gets working authentication, friends lists, groups, chat, leaderboards, tournaments, matchmaking and in-app purchase validation on day one, and writes Go, TypeScript or Lua only for what is specific to the game.

SpacetimeDB removes a tier. Its documentation describes application state held in memory for speed, a commit log for durability, and the entire backend running as a single binary. Logic lives in a module made of tables and reducers, which the docs describe as functions clients call to change data, with changes written directly to the database. Clients do not poll or call fetch endpoints for state. They register subscriptions, and SpacetimeDB "automatically mirrors" the matching rows into a local cache and keeps it live. Clockwork Labs' pitch is that this replaces "microservices, containers, Kubernetes, Docker, VMs, DevOps" with one deployable unit.

What You Get on Day One

This is the sharpest difference. Nakama is a product for shipping the standard furniture of an online game without designing it. SpacetimeDB is closer to an engine for backend state: it gives every game real-time, transactional, queryable shared state, and nothing else is prebuilt in the documentation reviewed for this page. A leaderboard is a table and a query. A friends list is a table and some reducers. Matchmaking is logic the team writes. Row-level security filters control which rows each client may see.

Which is better depends on the game. A match-based mobile title with clans, seasonal leaderboards and store receipts maps closely onto Nakama's feature list, and rebuilding those systems in SpacetimeDB would be wasted effort. A persistent world, where most of the backend work is simulating shared state and pushing the right slice of it to each player, maps closely onto SpacetimeDB's model. Clockwork Labs' own proof point is its MMORPG BitCraft Online, whose backend it says "runs as a single SpacetimeDB module: chat, items, terrain, player positions, everything, synchronized to thousands of players in real-time".

Licensing and Self-Hosting

Nakama's server and client libraries are Apache-2.0, a permissive open-source licence with no limits on production use. The catch is scale-out: Heroic Labs describes multi-node clustering, with peer discovery, state replication and failover, as part of Nakama Enterprise, a commercial licence bundled with Heroic Cloud. Open-source Nakama can be run in production, and Heroic Labs says moving to Enterprise requires no code changes.

SpacetimeDB is source-available rather than open source in the usual sense. Its Business Source License 1.1 grant allows production use "with no more than one SpacetimeDB instance in production" and forbids offering it as a database service to third parties. Each release converts to AGPL v3.0 with a linking exception on its change date, which for version 2.11.0 is September 15, 2031. The project notes the licence does not require a studio to open-source its own code. Self-hosting is a single Docker command, but a studio that expects to need more than one production instance should read the grant carefully or talk to Clockwork Labs about Enterprise terms.

Hosting and Cost

SpacetimeDB's managed service, Maincloud, has public self-serve tiers. The Free tier includes a monthly energy credit described as roughly 3 million function calls and 1 GB of table storage, with unlimited monthly active users. Pro is $25 per month and adds automatic replication and backups, and Team is $250 per month with dedicated node reservation. Usage beyond the included credit is metered in the platform's energy unit.

Heroic Cloud sells dedicated capacity. Its pricing page uses a calculator based on Nakama CPU and database CPU, states there are no DAU, MAU or CCU limits, and does not publish a single list price, so a like-for-like comparison needs a quote. Heroic's LiveOps product, Satori, starts from $600 per month. The entry cost of trying SpacetimeDB in the cloud is therefore lower and more transparent, while Nakama's cheapest path is to self-host the open-source server.

Maturity and Ecosystem

Nakama has the broader game-engine reach, with official clients for Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot and Defold and documented console support, plus adjacent products for LiveOps and metagame systems. Heroic Labs' February 2026 newsletter cites Wildlight Entertainment's Highguard as a PC and console launch running on Nakama, Satori and Heroic Cloud. SpacetimeDB has fewer engine SDKs, covering Unity through C# and Unreal through C++, but more GitHub attention (25.3k stars against Nakama's 13.5k on October 6, 2026) and a faster-moving design. Star counts measure interest, not production use, and should be read that way.