Supabase is the right database for most developer projects in 2026: it bundles Postgres 15 with built-in auth, file storage, and realtime subscriptions, and the Pro plan starts at $25/month. If you only need a serverless Postgres with per-branch database copies for CI, Neon at $19/month is a sharper fit. PlanetScale is the pick for teams already on MySQL who ship schema changes constantly.
Our Top Pick
All Options Compared
| Feature | Supabase | Neon | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free available | Free available | Free available |
| Paid price | $25.00 USD/mo | $19.00 USD/mo | $29.00 USD/mo |
| Database | Postgres 15+ | — | — |
| Realtime Subscriptions | — | ||
| Rest Api | — | — | |
| Graphql Api | — | — | |
| Built In Auth | — | — | |
| File Storage | — | — | |
| Edge Functions | Deno runtime | — | — |
| Vector Search | — | — | |
| Row Level Security | — | — | |
| Self Hostable | — | — | |
| Postgres | — | — | |
| Branching | — | — | |
| Scale To Zero | — | — | |
| Autoscaling | — | — | |
| Connection Pooling | — | ||
| Extensions | — | Most pg extensions | — |
| Multi Region | — | Scale plan only | Pro+ plans |
| Point In Time Restore | — | — | |
| Builtin Auth | — | ||
| Mysql Compatible | — | — | |
| Database Branching | — | — | |
| Non Blocking Migrations | — | — | |
| Foreign Key Support | — | — | |
| Serverless | — | — | |
| Point In Time Recovery | — | — | Paid plans |
| Horizontal Sharding | — | — | Vitess-native |
| Score | 8/10 | 8/10 | 8/10 |
1. Supabase — Best Overall
Supabase gives you a full Postgres 15 backend without running your own infrastructure. The database itself supports foreign keys, joins, extensions like pgvector for AI workloads and PostGIS for geospatial queries, and row-level security policies that live in the database rather than your application code.
What separates Supabase from a plain managed Postgres is everything layered on top. PostgREST auto-generates a REST API from your schema the moment you define a table. Auth handles email, OAuth, magic links, and MFA without a separate service. File storage is built in. Realtime subscriptions over WebSockets work without extra setup. For a solo developer or small team, that bundle replaces several paid services at once.
The billing model has one real trap: the $25 Pro plan comes with $10 in compute credits covering one Micro instance. A second project costs at least $35/month total, not $25. Free projects pause after seven days of inactivity and require a manual resume, which kills demos at the worst moments. The gap between Pro at $25 and Team at $599 is also stark, with nothing in between for growing teams.
The self-hosting option is real and documented. If you want full control, the entire stack ships as Docker Compose or Kubernetes manifests.
2. Neon — Best Serverless Postgres
Neon is a database and nothing more, and that focus shows. The core differentiator is database branching using copy-on-write: every branch takes seconds to create and costs almost nothing in storage. In a CI pipeline each pull request can get its own isolated copy of the database schema, run migrations against it, and throw it away when the PR closes. That workflow is genuinely difficult to replicate on RDS or a basic managed Postgres.
Scale-to-zero is always on for the free tier, which means any low-traffic window produces a cold start that adds 500ms to two seconds on the first query. On the Launch plan at $19/month you can disable scale-to-zero to keep compute warm. The free tier permanent and requires no credit card, though storage caps out at 0.5 GB and 100 compute unit-hours per month.
Neon is real Postgres. Any ORM, migration tool, or client library that speaks Postgres works without modifications. For edge runtimes that cannot open a standard TCP connection, Neon ships its own serverless driver at @neondatabase/serverless. Databricks acquired Neon in 2025, which gives the project a credible long-term backer after years as an independent startup.
If you need auth, file storage, or realtime subscriptions, Neon does not provide them. You handle those externally.
3. PlanetScale — Best for MySQL Teams
PlanetScale runs on Vitess, the sharding layer that YouTube built to scale MySQL to its traffic levels. That foundation gives PlanetScale one genuinely useful capability: non-blocking schema changes. Instead of locking a table during a migration and taking down your app, PlanetScale runs schema changes in the background while traffic continues. For teams that have lived through production migration incidents, this alone justifies the switch.
The branching workflow mirrors git exactly. You create a branch of your production schema, apply changes in isolation, then open a deploy request that merges them non-blocking. The Scaler plan at $29/month covers multiple databases and includes Insights for query analytics.
The hard constraint is foreign keys. Vitess does not enforce them at the database level due to how it handles distributed sharding. You can define them in your ORM or application code, but the database will not reject an orphaned row. For most read-heavy or analytics workloads this is a non-issue; for anything with complex relational integrity, it requires careful handling.
PlanetScale dropped its free tier in early 2024, then brought it back as the Hobby plan. Whether it sticks is uncertain. The MySQL wire protocol compatibility means Prisma and Drizzle work without changes.
How We Ranked These
We ranked based on feature completeness relative to what a typical developer team actually needs: full SQL support, auth and storage bundling, branching for CI workflows, pricing predictability, and free tier usability. Products that solve only one part of the stack ranked lower than those covering more ground at a comparable price.