Neon vs CockroachDB
Side-by-side — pricing, strengths, tradeoffs, and fit.
Neon
Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero
CockroachDB
The most resilient distributed SQL database
At a glance
Open SourceFree Tier
● Established·From Freemium
Open SourceFree Tier
● Established·From Freemium
Overview
One-liner
One-liner
Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero
One-liner
The most resilient distributed SQL database
Maturity
Maturity
EstablishedMaturity
EstablishedOpen source
Open source
✓ YesOpen source
✓ YesPricing
Free tier
Free tier
✓ AvailableFree tier
✓ AvailableStarts at
Starts at
Freemium
Starts at
Freemium
Model
Model
Usage-based
Model
Hybrid
Enterprise
Enterprise
✕ NoneEnterprise
✕ NoneBest for
✓ Best for
Startups and solo developers who want serverless Postgres with a generous free tier and instant database branching for staging environments
Teams using Vercel or Next.js who need a modern Postgres backend that scales to zero
Indie developers building MVPs who need to minimize database costs with pay-per-use pricing
✓ Best for
Applications requiring global distribution, high availability, and strong consistency with PostgreSQL compatibility
Not ideal for
✕ Not for
Enterprises requiring on-premise deployment or strict data residency requirements
Applications needing persistent connections with high concurrency without connection pooling
✕ Not for
Simple single-region apps or workloads where a standard Postgres instance is sufficient
Strengths
↑ Strengths
Serverless Postgres
Database branching
Scale-to-zero
Autoscaling
↑ Strengths
Distributed SQL
PostgreSQL wire protocol
Auto-sharding
Multi-region
Weaknesses
↓ Weaknesses
Neon does not support Postgres event triggers due to superuser requirements
Neon lacks a local development setup for the serverless proxy
Neon does not provide cross-regional read replicas
Neon does not provide the pg_net extension
↓ Weaknesses
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