Head to head
Neon vs DigitalOcean Managed Databases
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
54/100 | 54/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #6 | #3 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 78 | 88 |
| AI Authority | 42 | 23 |
| Web Authority | 25 | 31 |
| Expert Assessment | 64 | 70 |
| TOP10 User Score | — | — |
| Pricing | Launch: no monthly minimum — compute $0.106/CU-hour, storage $0.35/GB-month · free tier: Free plan is permanent, no credit card: 100 projects, 10 branches/project, 100 CU-hours/project, autoscaling to 2 CU (8 GB RAM), scale to zero after 5 min, 0.5 GB storage/project, 6-hour history window, 1 manual snapshot, 5 GB egress, up to 60k Auth MAU, community support; hitting any monthly limit suspends compute until next billing month | $15.15/month (PostgreSQL/MySQL Basic, 1 GiB / 1 vCPU); Valkey from $15.00/month; MongoDB from $15.23/month · free tier: None |
| Pricing model | Usage-based (pay-as-you-go, metered hourly) with a permanent free tier | Usage-based |
| Best for | Teams running many short-lived, mostly-idle Postgres databases — preview environments, per-PR branches, per-customer sandboxes — and startups or AI/agent builders with spiky load who want Postgres plus pgvector with no seat costs and no monthly minimum. | Startups, freelancers, agencies and small product teams running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB or a Valkey cache who want a fixed, forecastable monthly line item and a console they can operate without a DBA — especially teams already on DigitalOcean Droplets or Kubernetes. |
| Avoid if | You run latency-critical low-traffic production apps (cold starts), steady-state high-utilisation workloads where there is no idle to reclaim at $0.222/CU-hour, need compliance or an SLA below the Scale tier, need more than 56 CU / 224 GB RAM, or must commit to a hard fixed monthly budget. | You need PostgreSQL superuser access or unsupported extensions, backup retention beyond seven days, wide global region coverage and deep customisation, contractual refundability, or very high connection counts on small plans; HIPAA buyers must also budget for mandatory paid support. |
| Markets | Startups, SMB, Developers, Agencies, Enterprise (Scale plan), AI/agent platforms | SMB, Startups, Freelancers, Agencies |
| Founded | 2021 | — |
| Headquarters | Menlo Park, California, United States | — |
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.