Neon vs PlanetScale vs Turso

Three serverless managed-database options with three different bets — branchable serverless Postgres, MySQL with a Vitess-style developer workflow, and edge-replicated SQLite that runs close to users.

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 Neon when you want serverless Postgres with branchable databases per preview deploy and scale-to-zero — the best fit for Postgres teams who like the modern serverless workflow. Pick PlanetScale when you're committed to MySQL, expect heavy write traffic, and value their schema-change developer experience built on the Vitess heritage. Pick Turso when latency matters globally and you want edge-replicated SQLite running close to users — a different shape of database that trades joins and write-heavy workloads for fast reads everywhere.

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At a Glance

Attribute	Neon	PlanetScale	Turso
Category	Database	Database	Database
Pricing Model	freemium	paid	freemium
Starting Price	Free / $19/mo	$39/mo	Free / $29/mo
Free Tier	Yes	No	Yes
Open Source	Yes	No	Yes
Platforms	web, api	web, api	—

Community Popularity

Neon

PlanetScale

Turso

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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Turso

Pros

Pricing is genuinely cheap — the free tier includes 9GB storage and 500 databases which covers most indie projects indefinitely+141
Edge replication puts a read replica close to every user without any configuration, which makes global apps feel instant+128
SQLite is so simple that onboarding a new developer takes minutes — there's no server to configure or connection string to debug+103
The embedded replica feature lets you run the database in-process for zero-latency reads in serverless environments+87
Drizzle ORM integration is first-class and the setup docs are the best in the SQLite ecosystem right now+76

Cons

SQLite's limited ALTER TABLE support means schema migrations are more awkward than with Postgres — you often have to recreate tables+118
Write latency goes to the primary region, so users far from your primary location will see slower write performance than reads+94
Multi-tenant setups with hundreds of databases sound great in theory but managing that many separate databases adds operational complexity+83
The ecosystem is still young and you'll hit undocumented edge cases that require digging through GitHub issues to resolve+71

See full review of Turso→