PlanetScale vs Xata: Feature Comparison | TechStackVS

PlanetScale vs Xata

The world's most advanced serverless MySQL platform

See alternatives →

Serverless database platform with search and analytics built in

See alternatives →

At a Glance

Attribute	PlanetScale	Xata
Category	Database	Database
Pricing Model	paid	freemium
Starting Price	$39/mo	Free / $20/mo
Free Tier	No	Yes
Open Source	No	No
Platforms	web, api	—

Community Popularity

PlanetScale

68

Xata

45

Key Features

PlanetScale

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

Xata

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

More comparisons featuring PlanetScale

Database

Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale

Database

PlanetScale vs Neon

Database

Supabase vs Neon vs PlanetScale

Looking for alternatives?

Get the next comparison in your inbox

Weekly digest — no spam, unsubscribe anytime.