PlanetScale vs TigerData
A detailed comparison to help you choose between PlanetScale and TigerData.
Quick Verdict
4.2/5
PlanetScale
0 reviews
4.2/5
TigerData
0 reviews
Both PlanetScale and TigerData are equally rated at 4.2/5. Managed Postgres and MySQL (Vitess) databases with branching and zero-downtime schema changes. No free tier; Postgres starts at $5/month, Vitess at $39/month. TigerData, from the creators of TimescaleDB, is a PostgreSQL cloud platform built for time-series and real-time analytics workloads at large scale, aimed at developers and enterprises.
PlanetScale Serverless MySQL with database branching | TigerData PostgreSQL-native time-series database for metrics, events, and analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.2 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Starting price | From $5/mo✓ | From $30/mo |
| Best for | Teams running MySQL (or Postgres) at scale who want Vitess-grade sharding and safe, reviewable schema migrations without operating the infrastructure themselves | Teams building observability, IoT/telemetry, financial or real-time analytics platforms who want time-series performance inside standard PostgreSQL and can run the ops model of a managed Postgres service. |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | 0 vCPU | — |
| RAM | 1 GB | — |
| Storage | 10 GB | — |
| Bandwidth | 0 TB/mo | — |
| SLA uptime | 99.99%✓ | 99.9% |
| Data-center count | 19✓ | 17 |
| €/GB RAM/mo | €5.00 | — |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ✓ | |
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | 12 AWS + 7 GCP regions incl. US, EU, APAC (Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul) and South America (Sao Paulo) | 13 AWS regions + 4 Azure regions across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and South America |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi access | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi accessopen source |
| Visit PlanetScale → | Visit TigerData → | |
PlanetScale
Pros
- + Built by the Vitess maintainers — branching, deploy requests and online schema migrations are first-class
- + Three engines (Postgres, Vitess, sharded Neki) plus Metal local-NVMe tiers for I/O-heavy workloads
- + Unusually transparent pricing: published SKU tables and a SQL-queryable per-region pricing endpoint
- + Three-zone HA with automatic failover and a 99.99% SLA on HA configurations
- + 19 AWS/GCP regions plus a bring-your-own-cloud Managed option for data-residency needs
Cons
- - No free tier or trial — the Hobby plan was retired in April 2024
- - Metered extras (storage, egress, backups, branch hours) make the real bill higher than sticker prices
- - Vitess constraints: no foreign keys in the classic model and a real sharding learning curve
- - Single-node $5 entry is not highly available; production HA starts at $15/month before usage
TigerData
Pros
- + Full SQL and the PostgreSQL extension ecosystem — hypertables, continuous aggregates and 90%+ compression without a new query language
- + Published consumption pricing (compute from $30/month, storage $0.177-0.212/GB-month) with hourly metering and no instance-size lock-in
- + 17 regions across AWS and Azure with EU, US and APAC residency selectable at creation
- + Reliability productized: multi-AZ HA, PITR up to 14 days, backup retention to 180 days, cross-region restore, public SLA and status page
- + Open-source TimescaleDB escape hatch — self-hosting stays viable, which keeps pricing honest
Cons
- - Hourly compute meter bills full hours and forgotten scale-ups at the higher config are expensive
- - Serious reliability and security features (multi-node HA, 14-day PITR, SOC 2, private endpoints) gated behind Scale or Enterprise
- - PostgreSQL and time-series concepts (chunks, compression/retention policies) assumed — not a zero-ops database for non-database teams
- - Effective storage price assumes 5x compression; actual ratios are workload-dependent
- - Aiven-partnered legacy MST product carries a different (99.99%) SLA — easy to confuse with Tiger Cloud
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