PlanetScale Vitess vs TigerData
A detailed comparison to help you choose between PlanetScale Vitess and TigerData.
Quick Verdict
3.8/5
PlanetScale Vitess
0 reviews
4.2/5
TigerData
0 reviews
TigerData 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. 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 Vitess CNCF-graduated MySQL-compatible sharding system, born at YouTube | TigerData PostgreSQL-native time-series database for metrics, events, and analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.8 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | free | freemium |
| Starting price | Free✓ | From $30/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 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. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ✓ | |
| Snapshots | ✓ | |
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ✓ | |
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Data-center locations | ||
| Regions | — | 13 AWS regions + 4 Azure regions across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and South America |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tieropen sourceself hostableapi access | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi accessopen source |
| Visit PlanetScale Vitess → | Visit TigerData → | |
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
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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