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Amazon Redshift vs PlanetScale
Short answer: Pick Amazon Redshift if you want SQL analytics on petabyte-scale data; pick PlanetScale if you want sharded MySQL/Postgres with unlimited IOPS. Amazon Redshift is paid, with a free trial; PlanetScale starts at $5/month.
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 PlanetScale's)
Pick PlanetScale if you want…
- Sharded MySQL/Postgres with unlimited IOPS
- Scalable MySQL hosting
- Integrations with Fivetran, Airbyte or Hightouch (on PlanetScale'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.
- PlanetScale:PlanetScale provides managed, horizontally-sharded MySQL, Vitess, and Postgres databases with unlimited IOPS and high-availability.
- Best for
- Amazon Redshift:SQL analytics on petabyte-scale data
- PlanetScale:Sharded MySQL/Postgres with unlimited IOPS
- Who it’s for
- Amazon Redshift:Data engineers, analysts, and developers building analytics or AI workloads on AWS.
- PlanetScale:Developers and teams needing scalable, high-performance cloud databases.
- Pricing
- Amazon Redshift:Paid
- PlanetScale:Paid
- Starting price
- Amazon Redshift:—
- PlanetScale:$5/month (Single-node Postgres)
- Free plan or trial
- Amazon Redshift:Free trial
- PlanetScale:—
- Plans
- Amazon Redshift:Provisioned (On-Demand) $0.543 per hour per hour · Serverless $1.50 per hour per hour (per-second increment
- PlanetScale:Single-node Postgres $5 per month · PlanetScale Metal $50 per month
- Works with
- Amazon Redshift:Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon MSK, Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, Apache Iceberg
- PlanetScale:Fivetran, Airbyte, Hightouch, Datadog, Vantage, Debezium, Prometheus, pganalyze
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.
PlanetScale features
- Horizontal sharding. Vitess and Neki enable explicit sharding for MySQL and Postgres across thousands of nodes.
- Branch-per-environment. Each branch runs on its own isolated cluster for safe schema changes.
- Unlimited IOPS on NVMe. PlanetScale Metal uses blazing-fast NVMe drives with unlimited IOPS.
- High-availability clusters. One primary and two replicas across three availability zones with automated failover.
- Built-in connection pooling. PgBouncer for Postgres and similar pooling for MySQL reduce connection overhead.
- Query Insights & observability. Integrated monitoring dashboards for Vitess, Neki, and Postgres workloads.
- Database Traffic Control™. Set flexible budgets on query traffic to prevent runaway queries.
- Security & compliance. SOC 1/2, PCI DSS, HIPAA compliance with IP restrictions and private link options.
Amazon Redshift vs PlanetScale FAQ
What is the difference between Amazon Redshift and PlanetScale?+
PlanetScale provides a MySQL-compatible serverless platform focused on horizontal scaling, not the analytics-oriented columnar engine of Redshift.
Should I use Amazon Redshift or PlanetScale?+
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 PlanetScale's). Pick PlanetScale if you want sharded MySQL/Postgres with unlimited IOPS, scalable MySQL hosting or integrations with Fivetran, Airbyte or Hightouch (on PlanetScale's list, not Amazon Redshift's).
Is Amazon Redshift or PlanetScale free?+
No, both are paid and neither has a free plan. Amazon Redshift is paid, with a free trial. PlanetScale is paid, from $5/month (Single-node Postgres).
Do Amazon Redshift and PlanetScale 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; PlanetScale lists Fivetran, Airbyte, Hightouch, Datadog and 8 more.
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.