PlanetScale vs Neon

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

PlanetScale

The world's most advanced serverless MySQL platform

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Neon

Serverless Postgres with branching and instant scale-to-zero

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

Community Popularity

PlanetScale

Neon

Key Features

PlanetScale

managed MySQL
database branching
non-blocking schema changes
horizontal sharding
Insights
boost queries
audit log

Neon

Pros & Cons

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

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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

Cons

Scale-to-zero is great for cost but the cold start on a sleeping database adds 500ms-1s of latency to the first request, which can surprise users+145
Some Postgres extensions aren't available yet on Neon because of the storage separation architecture+96
The free tier is limited to a single project and 10 branches, which is tight if you're managing multiple apps+81
The billing dashboard is confusing — compute hour pricing requires math to predict your monthly bill accurately+72

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PlanetScale vs Neon

At a Glance

Community Popularity

Key Features

Pros & Cons

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