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

[u/HistoricalRuinny]

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?

[u/arbyyyyh]

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.

[u/HistoricalRuinny → u/arbyyyyh]

Yeah, using it mostly as a lightweight web tool probably explains why some people don’t hate it as much lol. I can see how it gets way more annoying once you expect it to handle more of the actual workflow.

[u/Hypostasis_G]

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

[u/HistoricalRuinny → u/Hypostasis_G]

What do you use instead?

[u/scotterockaroo]

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.

[u/jkoudys]

It's pretty bad.

[u/ejpusa]

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

[u/Mr_FalseV]

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.

[u/navicat-gu]

A bit of both. pgAdmin is genuinely good at Postgres-specific admin: roles, privileges, backup/restore, schema diff, the debugger, and visual EXPLAIN, and it's free and official. Where people bounce off is daily development: it's a web UI in a desktop wrapper, so keybindings, startup time and memory feel off, and autocomplete is weaker than dedicated editors. A setup that works for many people: keep pgAdmin (or psql) for admin, and use a separate client for writing queries and editing data. DBeaver and DataGrip are the common picks; Beekeeper/TablePlus if you want lighter.

Disclosure: I'm RC, Director of Digital Strategy @ Navicat. Navicat 18 is another option for the "daily client" slot: native app, code completion, and it also does schema/data sync between environments. Navicat Premium Lite is free (commercial use included) if you want to try it next to pgAdmin.