Supabase vs Neon vs PlanetScale

Three managed-database platforms head-to-head — full Postgres backend, serverless Postgres, and serverless MySQL — pick the one whose engine and scope match your stack.

Supabase

The open source Firebase alternative with Postgres

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Neon

Serverless Postgres with branching and instant scale-to-zero

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Our take

Pick Supabase when you want Postgres plus auth, storage, and edge functions under one roof with a credible self-host path. Pick Neon when you only need the database — serverless Postgres with branching that scales to zero — and you'll wire up auth and storage separately. Pick PlanetScale when MySQL is the requirement, you expect heavy write traffic, and you want their Vitess-backed schema-change workflow.

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At a Glance

Attribute	Supabase	Neon	PlanetScale
Category	Database	Database	Database
Pricing Model	freemium	freemium	paid
Starting Price	Free / $25/mo	Free / $19/mo	$39/mo
Free Tier	Yes	Yes	No
Open Source	Yes	Yes	No
Platforms	web, postgres, edge	web, api	web, api

Community Popularity

Supabase

Neon

PlanetScale

Key Features

Supabase

database
authentication
storage
realtime
edge functions

Neon

serverless Postgres
database branching
autoscaling compute

Pros & Cons

Supabase

Pros

Postgres under the hood means you can use any standard SQL tool and your existing knowledge transfers directly+187
The free tier is genuinely generous — 500MB database and 2GB storage is enough to validate most SaaS ideas without spending a cent+164
Row-level security policies are built in, so you can ship a secure multi-tenant app without writing custom auth middleware+142
Auto-generated TypeScript types from your schema save hours every week and eliminate an entire class of runtime bugs+138
Storage, auth, edge functions, and database all in one dashboard — I stopped juggling six different services+121

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Supabase vs Neon

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Neon

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Cons

Hitting the connection limit on the free tier (60 connections) will silently fail your app at the worst possible moment under load+178
Self-hosting is technically possible but the documentation is scattered and keeping up with upstream changes is a maintenance burden+112
Edge functions have a cold start delay that makes them unsuitable for latency-sensitive operations without warm-up tricks+98
The dashboard UI has had confusing UX regressions after updates that made simple tasks like inspecting RLS policies harder to find+89
Branching for database preview environments is still immature compared to Neon — you can't easily spin up a branch per PR+74

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

See full review of Neon→

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

See full review of PlanetScale→

Supabase vs Neon vs PlanetScale

At a Glance

Community Popularity

Key Features

Pros & Cons

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