PlanetScale vs MongoDB Atlas

At a Glance

PlanetScale

MongoDB Atlas

PlanetScale

MongoDB Atlas

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

Database

Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale

Database

PlanetScale vs Neon

Database

Supabase vs Neon vs PlanetScale

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MongoDB Atlas

Pros

The flexible document model means you can iterate on your data shape in early product development without migrations+132
Atlas Search gives you full-text search with relevance ranking built directly into your database without a separate service+118
The aggregation pipeline is incredibly powerful once you learn it — complex transformations that would require joins in SQL are often one pipeline stage+104
Global clusters with regional reads and writes let you build truly multi-region apps without managing replication yourself+89

Cons

Schema-less sounds great until you have inconsistent data across millions of documents and no enforcement to help you find the problem+189
The free M0 tier is only 512MB and shared — once you need more it jumps to $57/mo for an M10, with nothing in between for budget projects+172
The pricing calculator is confusing and your bill can double unexpectedly based on data transfer charges you didn't anticipate+143
Mongoose and the Node.js driver have a painful mismatch of types and validation that TypeScript can't fully rescue you from+134
Joining across collections with $lookup is slow and verbose — it's a constant reminder that this isn't the right tool for relational data+108