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Amazon Redshift vs Neon
Short answer: Pick Amazon Redshift if you want SQL analytics on petabyte-scale data; pick Neon if you want serverless Postgres with full backend suite. Amazon Redshift is paid, with a free trial; Neon has a free plan.
Which to pick
Pick Amazon Redshift if you want…
- SQL analytics on petabyte-scale data
- Integrations with Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Aurora or Amazon Kinesis (on Amazon Redshift's list, not Neon's)
Pick Neon if you want…
- Serverless Postgres with full backend suite
- Serverless PostgreSQL
- A free plan to start with
- Integrations with Better Auth, Databricks or pgBouncer (on Neon's list, not Amazon Redshift's)
Side by side
- What it is
- Amazon Redshift:Amazon Redshift is a fully managed cloud data warehouse for fast, scalable SQL analytics on structured and lakehouse data.
- Neon:Neon provides a serverless Postgres database with built-in auth, object storage, functions and an AI gateway.
- Best for
- Amazon Redshift:SQL analytics on petabyte-scale data
- Neon:Serverless Postgres with full backend suite
- Who it’s for
- Amazon Redshift:Data engineers, analysts, and developers building analytics or AI workloads on AWS.
- Neon:Developers building apps or agents that need instant, branchable backends.
- Pricing
- Amazon Redshift:Paid
- Neon:Freemium
- Free plan or trial
- Amazon Redshift:Free trial
- Neon:Free plan (Free)
- Plans
- Amazon Redshift:Provisioned (On-Demand) $0.543 per hour per hour · Serverless $1.50 per hour per hour (per-second increment
- Neon:Free $0
- Works with
- Amazon Redshift:Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon MSK, Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, Apache Iceberg
- Neon:Better Auth, Databricks, pgBouncer
Amazon Redshift features
- Serverless compute. Redshift Serverless auto-scales compute and charges per-second, eliminating cluster management.
- RG and RA3 nodes. Graviton-powered RG instances deliver up to 2.4× faster queries at 30% lower per-vCPU cost.
- Open format support. Native read/write of Apache Iceberg v3 and Parquet tables directly from S3.
- Integrated ML & AI. Run Redshift ML and use Amazon Bedrock or SageMaker for in-SQL machine-learning and generative AI.
- Concurrency scaling & reservations. Automatic extra compute for burst workloads with optional reservations for up to 45% cost savings.
Neon features
- Serverless Postgres. Lakebase Postgres scales compute and storage independently and auto-scales in real time.
- Managed Auth. Fully-managed Better Auth integration provides free user authentication per database.
- Branchable Storage. S3-compatible object storage and database branches copy-on-write for isolated environments.
- Functions. Serverless functions run close to the database without timeouts.
- AI Gateway. Single API to access frontier and open-source models at cost-based rates.
- Autoscaling & Scale-to-Zero. Compute auto-adjusts to demand and scales to zero when idle, billed per CU-hour.
- High Availability & Read Replicas. Multi-AZ storage and read replicas are included on all plans.
- Extensions Library. Supports Postgres extensions such as pg_vector, PostGIS, TimescaleDB, etc.
Amazon Redshift vs Neon FAQ
What is the difference between Amazon Redshift and Neon?+
Neon offers a serverless Postgres experience, whereas Redshift is a columnar data warehouse with built-in lakehouse and AI features.
Should I use Amazon Redshift or Neon?+
Pick Amazon Redshift if you want SQL analytics on petabyte-scale data or integrations with Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Aurora or Amazon Kinesis (on Amazon Redshift's list, not Neon's). Pick Neon if you want serverless Postgres with full backend suite, serverless PostgreSQL or a free plan to start with.
Is Amazon Redshift or Neon free?+
Amazon Redshift is paid, with a free trial. Neon has a free plan and paid plans.
Do Amazon Redshift and Neon integrate with the same tools?+
Their integration lists don't overlap: Amazon Redshift lists Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon MSK and 5 more; Neon lists Better Auth, Databricks and pgBouncer.
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.