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PlanetScale

Managed MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres hosting built for high performance and horizontal scale.

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About PlanetScale

PlanetScale started as a hosted version of Vitess, the MySQL sharding system created at YouTube, and has since added managed Postgres and Neki, its sharded Postgres offering. Its pitch is performance and reliability for production workloads: high-availability clusters across three availability zones, Metal instances on local NVMe storage, schema-change workflows with deploy requests that avoid locking tables, and query insights for spotting slow queries. PlanetScale removed its free hobby tier in 2024, so it is a paid service, but a single-node Postgres option makes the entry price low for development and small production apps. Pricing is per cluster size and storage, published openly, and it is also sold through the AWS and Google Cloud marketplaces. There are no built-in auth, storage or API layers; you connect from your own backend code or ORM. It is aimed at engineering teams who care about database operations rather than beginners looking for an all-in-one backend.

Best for: Engineering teams running demanding MySQL or Postgres workloads in production.

Pros and cons

What works

  • Horizontal sharding for MySQL via Vitess, and now Postgres
  • Non-blocking schema change workflow
  • High-performance Metal instances on local NVMe

Why people leave

  • No free tier
  • Database only, with no auth, storage or API layer
  • Sharding features are overkill for small apps

Top PlanetScale alternatives

See all 5
  1. 1Neon logo
    Neon

    Serverless Postgres with a free tier and branching for smaller projects.

    66.5
  2. 2CockroachDB logo
    CockroachDB

    Distributed SQL with multi-region writes if global consistency matters.

    62.6
  3. 3Aiven logo
    Aiven

    Managed MySQL and Postgres across clouds with a free entry tier.

    59.6
  4. 4Amazon RDS logo
    Amazon RDS

    Run managed MySQL or Postgres directly inside your own AWS account.

    57.2
  5. 5Supabase logo
    Supabase

    Postgres with a full backend layer when you also need auth and storage.

    55.3

Why people left PlanetScale

In reviewers' own words, from reviews of the apps they moved to. These are their opinions, not ours.

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PlanetScale: common questions

Is PlanetScale free?

No, PlanetScale is a paid product. Starting price: $5/month (single-node Postgres) (checked on PlanetScale's own site).

Is PlanetScale open source?

No, PlanetScale is not open source. Open-source alternatives include Supabase.

What platforms does PlanetScale run on?

PlanetScale is available for Web.

What are the best alternatives to PlanetScale?

The highest-ranked PlanetScale alternatives right now are Neon, CockroachDB and Aiven. See the full ranked list for pricing, platforms and verified facts.

See all 5 PlanetScale alternatives