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PlanetScale vs TiDB Serverless
PlanetScale hosts MySQL with horizontal scaling but lacks built-in real-time analytics.
PlanetScaleHosted MySQL and Postgres built for scale
TiDB Serverless🔥🔥🔥 A MySQL compatible serverless database with auto scaling and real-time analysis.Which to pick
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 TiDB Serverless')
Pick TiDB Serverless if you want…
- Serverless MySQL-compatible analytics
- A free plan to start with (TiDB Cloud Starter)
- Open-source code (pingcap/tidb on GitHub, Apache-2.0 license)
- Integrations with MySQL, Google Cloud or Azure (on TiDB Serverless' list, not PlanetScale's)
Side by side
- What it is
- PlanetScale:PlanetScale provides managed, horizontally-sharded MySQL, Vitess, and Postgres databases with unlimited IOPS and high-availability.
- TiDB Serverless:TiDB Cloud is a fully managed, MySQL-compatible serverless database with auto-scaling, real-time analytics and pay-as-you-go pricing.
- Best for
- PlanetScale:Sharded MySQL/Postgres with unlimited IOPS
- TiDB Serverless:Serverless MySQL-compatible analytics
- Who it’s for
- PlanetScale:Developers and teams needing scalable, high-performance cloud databases.
- TiDB Serverless:Developers and teams building data-intensive apps that need MySQL compatibility and elastic scaling.
- Pricing
- PlanetScale:Paid
- TiDB Serverless:Freemium
- Plans
- PlanetScale:Single-node Postgres $5 per month · PlanetScale Metal $50 per month
- TiDB Serverless:TiDB Cloud Starter $0/month · TiDB Cloud Essential Preview ≈$20 / day per day · TiDB Cloud Premium Preview $1800 / month per month · TiDB Cloud Dedicated $0.22/hr per hour
- Open source
- PlanetScale:—
- TiDB Serverless:Yes, 40,624 GitHub stars
- Works with
- PlanetScale:Fivetran, Airbyte, Hightouch, Datadog, Vantage, Debezium, Prometheus, pganalyze
- TiDB Serverless:MySQL, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Kubernetes, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka
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.
TiDB Serverless features
- Serverless autoscaling. On-demand compute scales to zero when idle and automatically expands with workload.
- MySQL compatibility. Drop-in compatible with MySQL, enabling easy migration of existing applications.
- Real-time HTAP analytics. Run low-latency analytical queries on billions of rows alongside transactional workloads.
- Multi-cloud deployment. Available in over 30 regions on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Alibaba Cloud.
- Built-in security. Encryption at rest and in transit, IAM, VPC peering and optional CMEK for enterprise plans.
- Fully managed operations. Automated upgrades, health monitoring, backups and failover handled by PingCAP.
- Free tier storage. Permanent 5 GB storage (25 GiB row + 25 GiB column) and 250 M request units per month at no cost.
- Enterprise resilience. 99.99% availability, multi-zone protection and PCI-DSS/SOC 2 compliance for dedicated clusters.
PlanetScale vs TiDB Serverless FAQ
Is PlanetScale or TiDB Serverless free?+
PlanetScale is paid, from $5/month (Single-node Postgres). TiDB Serverless has a free plan (TiDB Cloud Starter) and paid plans.
Is PlanetScale or TiDB Serverless open source?+
TiDB Serverless is open source (pingcap/tidb on GitHub, Apache-2.0 license). DevHunt has no public source repository on record for PlanetScale.
Do PlanetScale and TiDB Serverless integrate with the same tools?+
Partly. Both list AWS. PlanetScale also lists Fivetran, Airbyte, Hightouch, Datadog and 7 more; TiDB Serverless also lists MySQL, Google Cloud, Azure, Alibaba Cloud and 4 more.
On DevHunt
Based on each tool's website and DevHunt data. Details may change; check the official sites.