Redis Cloud vs PlanetScale
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Redis Cloud and PlanetScale.
Quick Verdict
3.6/5
Redis Cloud
0 reviews
4.2/5
PlanetScale
0 reviews
PlanetScale is rated higher (4.2 vs 3.6). Redis Cloud is the official managed Redis service from Redis Ltd, the creators of Redis. Offers Redis Stack with JSON, search, and time series. Multi-cloud on AWS, GCP, Azure. 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.
Redis Cloud Managed Redis from the original creators | PlanetScale Serverless MySQL with database branching | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.6 (0 reviews) | 4.2 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Starting price | Free tier available✓ | From $5/mo |
| Best for | Teams running business-critical caching, session, real-time or vector workloads who want the Redis engine operated by its creators, with backups and SLAs included on paid plans. | 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% | 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 datacenterapac datacenterapi access | free tiermanaged optionbackups includedeu datacenterus datacenterapi access |
| Visit Redis Cloud → | Visit PlanetScale → | |
Redis Cloud
Pros
- + Managed by the stewards of upstream Redis, running the same engine (Redis 8) rather than a fork
- + Real free tier for learning and a low $5/month Essentials entry with published per-hour math
- + Paid plans include scheduled backups (daily on Essentials, hourly-capable on Pro) to your own S3/GCS/Azure/FTP
- + Broad footprint: AWS, Google Cloud and Azure regions across multiple continents, private connectivity on Pro
- + Redis 8 turns the cache into a document, search, vector and time-series engine in one binary
Cons
- - Costs compound fast at production scale — in-memory data plus HA plus multi-region is expensive
- - Free plan is tiny (30 MB, 100 ops/sec, no replication, no backups) and Essentials caps throughput per tier
- - Essentials database size includes replication — HA halves usable capacity
- - Published storage ceilings conflict between pages (12 GB vs 100 GB for Essentials)
- - Licensing history (2024 source-available switch) requires reading the license matrix for embedded use
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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