PlanetScale vs Upstash
A detailed comparison to help you choose between PlanetScale and Upstash.
Quick Verdict
4.2/5
PlanetScale
0 reviews
4.2/5
Upstash
0 reviews
Both PlanetScale and Upstash 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. Free tier includes 500,000 commands per month with 250 MB data (10,000 commands/sec is the throughput ceiling).
PlanetScale Serverless MySQL with database branching | Upstash Serverless Redis, Kafka, QStash — per-request pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.2 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Starting price | From $5/mo | Free tier available✓ |
| Best for | Teams running MySQL (or Postgres) at scale who want Vitess-grade sharding and safe, reviewable schema migrations without operating the infrastructure themselves | Serverless and edge developers needing caching, rate limiting, queues and agent state without running Redis |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | 0 vCPU | — |
| RAM | 1 GB | — |
| Storage | 10 GB✓ | 0 GB |
| Bandwidth | 0 TB/mo | 0 TB/mo |
| SLA uptime | 99.99% | — |
| Data-center count | 19 | — |
| €/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) | — |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi access | free tierapi access |
| Visit PlanetScale → | Visit Upstash → | |
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
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
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