Neon vs Upstash
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Neon and Upstash.
Quick Verdict
4.1/5
Neon
0 reviews
4.2/5
Upstash
0 reviews
Upstash 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. Free tier includes 500,000 commands per month with 250 MB data (10,000 commands/sec is the throughput ceiling).
Neon Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero | Upstash Serverless Redis, Kafka, QStash — per-request pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Serverless and edge developers needing caching, rate limiting, queues and agent state without running Redis |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | — |
| RAM | — | — |
| Storage | 1 GB✓ | 0 GB |
| Bandwidth | 0 TB/mo | 0 TB/mo |
| SLA uptime | — | — |
| Data-center count | 8 | — |
| 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 | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi accessopen source | free tierapi access |
| Visit Neon → | Visit Upstash → | |
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
Upstash
Pros
- + Genuine free tier: 500K commands/month, 250 MB, no credit card — one of four providers offering that in 2026
- + Per-request pricing fits serverless perfectly: idle costs nothing, HTTP access avoids connection pooling
- + Transparent pricing with published crossover math; per-database budgets rate-limit instead of overbilling
- + Global replication across 14 AWS regions (EU, US, APAC, SA, ZA) with reads from the nearest replica
- + Broad platform beyond Redis: Vector, Search, QStash, Workflow, Box and S3-compatible Blob, each with a free tier
Cons
- - Redis-compatible, not full Redis — validate command semantics before migrating
- - 10,000 commands/sec per database ceiling; sharding across DBs is on you beyond that
- - No public SLA with credits found; availability is a status page, not a contract
- - Backups appear tied to the Prod Pack add-on (+$200/mo per database); base plans leave recovery to you
- - Per-replica command counting doubles write costs on global databases; incident retry storms inflate bills
Stay in the loop
Get weekly updates on the best new hosting and infrastructure providers, deals, and comparisons.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.