Head to head
Amazon Cognito vs PlanetScale
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
44/100 | 56/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #8 | #1 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 79 | 69 |
| AI Authority | 0 | 52 |
| Web Authority | 35 | 25 |
| Expert Assessment | 60 | 75 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | Lite: $0.0055 per MAU above the free tier (first band), $0.0046 per MAU next band — AWS example 950,000 MAUs = $4,405/month · free tier: 10,000 MAU/month per account or AWS Organization on Lite and Essentials (does not expire); 50 MAU/month for SAML 2.0/OIDC federated users on any tier; identity pools free of charge; no free tier on Plus, none for M2M token requests, and none in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions | $5/month (Postgres PS-5 single node, EBS, us-east-1); $15/month for a 3-AZ HA PS-5 cluster · free tier: None — the vendor confirms the former Developer/Hobby free plan no longer exists and all databases require a paid subscription; there is no free evaluation path |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (pay-as-you-go per monthly active user, plus per-token and per-RPS add-ons) | Subscription (per-cluster SKU) plus metered storage, egress and backups |
| Best for | Engineering teams already running on AWS that are building consumer or B2C applications with social/direct sign-in, either below 10,000 MAU (free) or above roughly 500,000 MAU on Lite, and with in-house capacity to wire up Lambda triggers, IAM, KMS and SNS/SES. | Engineering teams that want branching-based schema workflows with predictable per-cluster pricing, MySQL shops needing Vitess horizontal sharding without operating it, IOPS-bound workloads suited to Metal NVMe, and enterprises needing the database inside their own AWS/GCP account with PCI via Managed. |
| Avoid if | You sell B2B SaaS where every user arrives via a corporate SAML/OIDC IdP, need adaptive authentication on a small user base, provision an app client per tenant beyond 2,500, operate in GovCloud, have no AWS footprint or platform engineering capacity, or require a fixed predictable monthly invoice. | You need a free tier or a zero-cost evaluation path, run many production environments (each is a full-price cluster), need Postgres horizontal sharding or read-only regions today, require PCI on a single-tenant deployment, or your procurement process demands a large verifiable review corpus. |
| Markets | SMB, Enterprise, Startups, Consumer/B2C applications, Public sector (with GovCloud limitations) | SMB, Startups, Enterprise, Engineering teams |
| Founded | — | — |
| Headquarters | — | — |
A higher TOP SCORE means more of the evidence favours that platform on this methodology — it is not a recommendation, and it does not account for your specific requirements. Advertisers are never declared the winner of a comparison.