Head to head
Neon vs PlanetScale
Both platforms are scored with the same methodology and the same category rubric. Nothing on this page is influenced by advertising.
54/100 | 56/100Higher score | |
|---|---|---|
| Category rank | #6 | #1 |
| Confidence | High confidence | High confidence |
| External Reputation | 78 | 69 |
| AI Authority | 42 | 52 |
| Web Authority | 25 | 25 |
| Expert Assessment | 64 | 75 |
| 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 | $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, metered hourly) with a permanent free tier | Subscription (per-cluster SKU) plus metered storage, egress and backups |
| 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. | 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 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 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 | Startups, SMB, Developers, Agencies, Enterprise (Scale plan), AI/agent platforms | SMB, Startups, Enterprise, Engineering teams |
| 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.