PlanetScale Vitess vs PlanetScale
A detailed comparison to help you choose between PlanetScale Vitess and PlanetScale.
Quick Verdict
3.8/5
PlanetScale Vitess
0 reviews
4.2/5
PlanetScale
0 reviews
PlanetScale is rated higher (4.2 vs 3.8). Vitess is the CNCF-graduated, MySQL-compatible database system created at YouTube in 2010. It adds transparent horizontal sharding, online schema changes and automatic failure repair around MySQL; PlanetScale is its largest commercial contributor and managed offering. 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.
PlanetScale Vitess CNCF-graduated MySQL-compatible sharding system, born at YouTube | PlanetScale Serverless MySQL with database branching | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.8 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | free | paid |
| Starting price | Free✓ | From $5/mo |
| Best for | Teams whose MySQL-compatible dataset no longer fits one node and who want sharding without rewriting the application — self-hosting Vitess with Kubernetes experience, or buying it managed through PlanetScale. | Teams running MySQL (or Postgres) at scale who want Vitess-grade sharding and safe, reviewable schema migrations without operating the infrastructure themselves |
| Specifications (entry plan) | ||
| CPU cores | — | 0 vCPU |
| RAM | — | 1 GB |
| Storage | — | 10 GB |
| Bandwidth | — | 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 tieropen sourceself hostableapi access | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi access |
| Visit PlanetScale Vitess → | Visit PlanetScale → | |
PlanetScale Vitess
Pros
- + Free, foundation-governed software with YouTube-scale production provenance since 2011
- + Horizontal sharding transparent to the application, with live resharding and near-zero-downtime migrations
- + Online, non-blocking schema changes across shards with monitoring and fine-grained controls
- + Automatic primary failure detection and repair; point-in-time recovery without a binlog server since v18
- + Active, healthy project — 2,159 contributors tracked by CNCF, with public nightly benchmarks
Cons
- - Real operational burden: VTGates, VTTablets, topology store and a Kubernetes operator footprint to run yourself
- - Foreign keys are shard-scoped only (managed mode since v18); cross-shard constraints are still future work
- - Compatibility gaps under managed foreign keys — REPLACE INTO and INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE restricted, cyclic FKs rejected
- - No support contract or SLA on the free software; PlanetScale is the primary paid route
- - Massive overkill below the scale where a single MySQL node stops being enough
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
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