PlanetScale vs Vitess: Feature Comparison | TechStackVS

PlanetScale vs Vitess

The world's most advanced serverless MySQL platform

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Scalable clustering system for MySQL built at YouTube

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At a Glance

Attribute	PlanetScale	Vitess
Category	Database	Database
Pricing Model	paid	open-source
Starting Price	$39/mo	Free
Free Tier	No	Yes
Open Source	No	Yes
Platforms	web, api	—

Community Popularity

PlanetScale

68

Vitess

48

Key Features

PlanetScale

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

Vitess

No features listed.

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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