PlanetScale - 2026 Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

PlanetScale is the managed database platform built by the teams behind some of the largest databases in the world, including GitHub, Slack, and Square. With PlanetScale, you can run both Postgres and Vitess (sharded MySQL) on a single platform with unified billing, observability, and support. Deploy on AWS or GCP with multi-cloud flexibility.

Choose the storage tier that fits your workload. PlanetScale Metal provides bare-metal NVMe storage with unlimited IOPS for maximum throughput and consistent latency for the best price to performance ratio. Network-attached storage is also available for different performance and cost requirements. Plans start at $5/month.

PlanetScale Insights gives you deep query-level performance data, anomaly detection, and schema recommendations — all built into the dashboard with no third-party tools required. PlanetScale also offers a robust MCP server, letting AI agents like Claude and Cursor interact with your database infrastructure directly.

Need to migrate? PlanetScale offers hands-on migration services with zero-downtime migrations at terabyte and petabyte scale. We also support PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA compliance, and bring-your-own-cloud deployment via PlanetScale Managed.

Vitess (MySQL): Built-in horizontal sharding distributes data across thousands of MySQL nodes behind a single database connection; zero-downtime, non-blocking schema changes with instant rollback and no data loss; git-like schema branching with deploy requests and team review workflows; built-in connection pooling and edge infrastructure eliminate MySQL connection limits; global replica credentials auto-route read traffic to the lowest-latency region; native vector support with full SQL syntax, JOINs, and ACID compliance.  Postgres: High-availability clusters across three availability zones with automated failover in under 30 seconds; built-in, fully managed connection pooling via PgBouncer; schema branching for isolated development and staging environments; read replicas to scale read throughput; automated backups with point-in-time recovery; Neki—next-generation Postgres sharding architecture, designed from first principles to bring Vitess-level horizontal scalability to PostgreSQL