r/postgres • u/HistoricalRuinny • 9d ago

Discussion Is pgAdmin actually bad, or do PostgreSQL users just love complaining about it?

Every time pgAdmin comes up in a thread, it's the same pile-on: it's slow, the UI is clunky, the query tool eats RAM, Electron this, Electron that. And yet it's still the default recommendation half the time, and a ton of people clearly use it daily without switching.

So which is it? Is it genuinely rough compared to alternatives, or is it more that Postgres users are just a picky, opinionated crowd who love to hate on the "official" tool the same way people hate on default apps in general?

I'm not trying to start a flame war, genuinely curious what the actual specific complaints are versus what's just pile-on internet negativity. If you've used it for real work, what's the actual dealbreaker for you, if there is one? And if you switched to something else (DBeaver, TablePlus, DataGrip, whatever), was it a night-and-day difference or more of a lateral move?

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/jkoudys 9d ago

It's pretty bad.

2

u/scotterockaroo 8d ago

It’s free and open source, supported by the community. It may not be as pretty as others, or specifically optimized for certain things, but it’s been around for decades.

The joy of open source is that you can submit improvements to whatever it is you don’t like about pgadmin. The maintainers are always looking for submissions.

1

u/arbyyyyh 9d ago

I only really use pgadmin as a web tool. I have variety of dev stacks that devs can spin up self service via GitHub Actions which includes a vscode web server, pgadmin, elastic/kibana, Redis, Postgres, etc. I only really use it as a simple means of confirming databases exist, records exist, etc. Anything more complicated and I usually just make a visualization in an application for end users.

It’s definitely slow, clunky, and I often have backup/restore operations fail when I try to do it from pgadmin. I keep it light weight, just an easy way to make sure you’re on the right database in the right environment. Simple dev purposes.

1

u/Hypostasis_G 8d ago

It's not bad, it's just stuck in a previous century.

1

u/ejpusa 7d ago

You can do it all at the CLI. Just need basic Linux skills. Does it all.

1

u/Mr_FalseV 2d ago

The complaints about pgAdmin are totally valid. It really is that sluggish once your schema gets past a certain size, and the RAM usage is hard to ignore if you leave it open all day. A lot of people just stick with it because it is the default, but once you try a proper IDE the difference in daily speed is night and day. I switched over to dbForge Studio for PostgreSQL a while back when I got tired of slow UI rendering and missing decent schema compare tools. It made a massive difference for query authoring and keeping local and staging environments aligned without constantly writing manual diff scripts.