Why Cogworks?
Cogworks is a self-hosted backend-as-a-service that ships as one binary. Drop it on any box, run it, and you get a database, a typed REST API, realtime, auth, file storage, background jobs, search, and a first-party MCP server for AI agents — assembled and wired together, with no black boxes and nothing to orchestrate.
It’s built on Bun + Hono + SQLite, and it’s a fork of Vaultbase whose main divergence is the HTTP layer (Elysia → Hono).
Choose Cogworks when…
Section titled “Choose Cogworks when…”- You want to own your data and your stack. One process, one SQLite file. No managed control plane, no per-seat pricing, no vendor to page.
- You want to ship, not assemble. Collections, REST, auth, realtime, queues, and search are already integrated — you don’t glue a database to an auth service to a job runner.
- Operational simplicity matters. A single binary is trivial to deploy, reproduce, back up (it’s a file), and reason about. Great for solo devs, small teams, edge boxes, on-prem, and air-gapped installs.
- You want AI agents to reach your data safely. The built-in MCP server exposes scope-gated, rate-limited tools that any agent (Claude, Cursor, …) can call — without you building an integration.
How it compares
Section titled “How it compares”| Cogworks | PocketBase | Supabase | Firebase | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Runs as | one binary | one binary | many services (or managed) | managed only |
| Database | SQLite | SQLite | Postgres | proprietary |
| Self-host | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (heavy) | ✗ |
| Realtime | WS + SSE + presence | SSE | ✓ | ✓ |
| Auth | password · OAuth2 · MFA · passkeys | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Server logic | JS hooks / routes / durable workflows | Go / JS hooks | edge functions | cloud functions |
| Queues & cron | built in | — | external | external |
| AI / MCP | first-party MCP server | — | — | — |
| Vendor lock-in | none (MIT, your file) | none | low–medium | high |
The closest peer is PocketBase — same single-binary, SQLite-first spirit. Cogworks leans further into the “batteries included” end: durable queues and workflows, vector search, an MCP server, encrypted fields, operator roles, and observability are in the box.
Choose something else when…
Section titled “Choose something else when…”- You don’t want to run a server at all. If a fully-managed backend is the goal, reach for Supabase or Firebase.
- You need Postgres specifically, horizontal write-scaling, or multi-region active-active. Cogworks is SQLite-first by design — brilliant for a single node, not a sharded cluster. (Read replicas / PITR are on the roadmap, not a distributed write layer.)
- You’re all-in on a cloud ecosystem (e.g. Firebase + the rest of Google).
- You need a large, battle-tested community today. Cogworks is young; if that’s a hard requirement, a more established project may fit better.
Honest about the trade-offs: the single-binary, SQLite-only model is the whole point — it’s what makes Cogworks simple. If those constraints don’t fit your problem, that’s a signal, not a bug.
- Introduction — what’s in the box, in one page.
- Getting started — install and first run.
- Feature workflow — build a feature end to end.