Head to head
Neon vs Google Cloud SQL / AlloyDB
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 | #5 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 78 | 82 |
| AI Authority | 42 | 50 |
| Web Authority | 25 | 9 |
| Expert Assessment | 64 | 68 |
| 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 | Cloud SQL shared-core db-f1-micro $0.0105/hr (us-central1); no SLA coverage for shared-core machine types · free tier: Cloud SQL: $300 in free credits for new customers plus a separate Cloud SQL free trial with restrictions removed on upgrade; AlloyDB: 30-day free trial cluster with up to 1 TB data, an 8-vCPU primary and an 8-vCPU single-node read pool, in addition to the 90-day $300 Google Cloud free trial. |
| 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. | Teams already standardised on Google Cloud running MySQL or PostgreSQL who want managed HA and PITR without DBAs, and have predictable enough capacity to commit to 1- or 3-year CUDs; for read-heavy PostgreSQL at scale, AlloyDB's shared-storage model and 288-vCPU nodes are the stronger fit. |
| 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 are a solo developer or small project needing a cheap SLA-backed instance, you hold existing SQL Server licences (no BYOL, $0.47/core-hr Enterprise with a four-core minimum), you need a firm forecastable monthly number before signing, you run an EOL major version, or your architecture is egress-heavy to clients outside Google Cloud at $0.19/GiB. |
| Markets | Startups, SMB, Developers, Agencies, Enterprise (Scale plan), AI/agent platforms | SMB, Enterprise, Startups, Developers |
| 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.