PlanetScale vs Neon

Two serverless database platforms with different engines and operational models — MySQL with Vitess sharding versus Postgres with database branching.

Neon

Serverless Postgres with branching and instant scale-to-zero

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PlanetScale

The world's most advanced serverless MySQL platform

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Our take

Pick PlanetScale when you're already committed to MySQL, expect heavy write traffic, and value their schema-change workflow on top of Vitess sharding. Pick Neon when Postgres is the requirement, you want database branching tied to your dev workflow, and scale-to-zero serverless economics matter more than horizontal sharding.

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At a Glance

Attribute	Neon	PlanetScale
Category	Database	Database
Pricing Model	freemium	paid
Starting Price	Free / $19/mo	$39/mo
Free Tier	Yes	No
Open Source	Yes	No
Platforms	web, api	web, api

Community Popularity

Neon

PlanetScale

Key Features

Neon

serverless Postgres
database branching
autoscaling compute
point-in-time restore
read replicas
scale to zero
instant provisioning

PlanetScale

Pros & Cons

Neon

Pros

Branching lets you create a full database copy in seconds, which finally makes database previews per pull request practical+168
Scale-to-zero means you pay nothing when your app is idle, making it the cheapest option for multiple staging environments+152
It's standard Postgres, so every extension, tool, and migration framework you already know works without modification+139
The connection pooling via pgBouncer is built in, so you don't hit connection limits when using serverless functions+127
Point-in-time restore is available even on paid tiers at a much lower price than managed Postgres alternatives+93

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PlanetScale

Pros

Branching model for database schema changes means you never run a raw ALTER TABLE in production again — a game changer for team workflows+183
Zero-downtime schema migrations are solved by default — no more 3am maintenance windows for adding a column+162
Vitess under the hood means it handles enormous write throughput that would kill a vanilla Postgres setup+147
The query insights dashboard identifies slow queries with execution plans before they become production incidents+109

Cons

They killed the free tier in 2024 and the cheapest plan is $39/mo — hard to justify for early-stage projects that might not survive+198
It's MySQL not Postgres, which cuts you off from a huge ecosystem of Postgres-native tools, extensions, and hiring pool+176
Foreign key constraints aren't supported because of the sharding model — you have to enforce referential integrity in application code+152
Prisma support works but you lose some ORM features due to the missing FK support, and you'll hit confusing errors if you're not aware+91

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PlanetScale vs Neon

At a Glance

Community Popularity

Key Features

Pros & Cons

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