Neon vs PlanetScale
Side-by-side — pricing, strengths, tradeoffs, and fit.
Neon
Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero
PlanetScale
MySQL-compatible serverless database that scales without limits
At a glance
Open SourceFree Tier
● Established·From Freemium
Open Source
● Established·From $5/mo
Overview
One-liner
One-liner
Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero
One-liner
MySQL-compatible serverless database that scales without limits
Maturity
Maturity
EstablishedMaturity
EstablishedOpen source
Open source
✓ YesOpen source
✓ YesPricing
Free tier
Free tier
✓ AvailableFree tier
✕ NoneStarts at
Starts at
Freemium
Starts at
$5/mo
Model
Model
Usage-based
Model
Usage-based
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
Growth-stage startups and scale-ups who need MySQL compatibility with horizontal scaling and zero-downtime schema changes
Enterprise teams running high-traffic applications that have outgrown single-node MySQL
Agency and consultant teams managing multiple production databases who need reliable branching workflows
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
Hobby developers or solo developers on a tight budget since the free tier was removed
Teams requiring Postgres instead of MySQL
Strengths
↑ Strengths
Serverless Postgres
Database branching
Scale-to-zero
Autoscaling
↑ Strengths
MySQL-compatible
Vitess-powered sharding
Non-blocking schema migrations
Database branching
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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