Neon vs CockroachDB
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Neon and CockroachDB.
Quick Verdict
4.1/5
Neon
0 reviews
4.2/5
CockroachDB
0 reviews
CockroachDB is rated higher (4.2 vs 4.1). Neon is serverless PostgreSQL with database branching, scale-to-zero, and connection pooling. Scales to zero when not in use — no idle charges. CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built to survive datacenter failures. Postgres-compatible, strong consistency, and automatic scaling across regions. Managed plans: Basic (usage-based, free tier), Standard and Advanced (provisioned), plus BYOC and the new Cockroach Continuum editions.
Neon Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero | CockroachDB Distributed SQL database that survives failures | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.1 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Developers on serverless stacks and teams that want a Postgres branch per pull request with zero idle cost | Applications where the database must survive region loss without losing transactions — payments, ledgers, identity, multi-region SaaS, global gaming backends — and teams ready for distributed-SQL trade-offs |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | 2 vCPU |
| RAM | — | — |
| Storage | 1 GB | — |
| Bandwidth | 0 TB/mo | — |
| SLA uptime | — | 99.99% |
| Data-center count | 8 | — |
| €/vCPU/mo | — | €0.00 |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ✓ | |
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Asia Pacific, South America | AWS, GCP and Azure regions across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific (multi-region clusters) |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi accessopen source | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapac datacenterapi access |
| Visit Neon → | Visit CockroachDB → | |
Neon
Pros
- + Scale-to-zero means idle databases cost nothing — Free plan compute suspends after 5 minutes
- + Copy-on-write branching gives real per-PR preview databases at near-zero marginal cost
- + Unit pricing is published openly ($0.106/CU-hour Launch, $0.35/GB-month storage) with no overage cliffs
- + Generous free tier: 100 projects, 100 CU-hours each, 1 GB storage per project
- + Multi-AZ storage, read replicas, connection pooling, and Postgres extensions included on all plans
Cons
- - Cold starts of a few hundred milliseconds after suspend on latency-sensitive traffic
- - Usage-based billing has no fixed monthly cap unless you set one yourself
- - Uptime SLA only on the Scale plan, and the percentage is not published on the pricing page
- - Region is fixed at project creation — relocation requires migration to a new project
- - Newer services (Functions, Object Storage, AI Gateway) roll out region by region
CockroachDB
Pros
- + True multi-region survivability with serializable transactions and Postgres wire compatibility
- + Generous free tier: Basic at $0/month with 50M RUs and 10 GiB free monthly, $400 trial credits, no card required
- + Contractual SLAs: 99.99% availability, up to 99.999% multi-region on Advanced; P1 response targets published
- + Transparent per-component cost documentation and a public pricing calculator
- + Enterprise compliance path (CMEK, PCI DSS, HIPAA) and AWS/GCP/Azure coverage
Cons
- - Production costs climb fast: storage billed at 4.5x durability multiplier, plus backups, CDC and egress
- - September 2026 plan restructure (Cockroach Continuum) splits new and existing customers onto different rate cards
- - Distributed-SQL learning curve: RU model, planner differences from vanilla Postgres, cross-region latency
- - Overkill for single-region applications — managed Postgres is far cheaper for the same job
- - Proprietary managed plane; open-core self-hosting shifts the operational burden back to you
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