Most people who search for a Neon alternative mean Neon, the serverless Postgres database with branching and scale to zero. It is alive and still has a free plan. Ownership changed. Neon's own announcement from May 14, 2025 said it would join Databricks, and press reports at the time put the price at about $1 billion. Today the pricing page describes Neon as "from Databricks" and "built around Lakebase Postgres".
The product is still cheap to start. The free plan gives 100 CU-hours and 1 GB of storage per project, 100 projects and 10 branches each, and the paid Launch plan bills $0.106 per CU-hour with no monthly minimum. Developers leave over the ownership change, the 1 GB cap, free-plan compute that always suspends after 5 idle minutes, or because they want auth, storage and APIs bundled with the database. The six services below are all Postgres, so most schemas and queries move with pg_dump and pg_restore. Aurora DSQL is the exception, as its entry explains.
A smaller group is looking for something else: Neon One, which sells Neon CRM to nonprofits. That is not a database. We cover it briefly at the end of this article.
Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Best for | Price | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Postgres plus auth, storage and APIs | Free; Pro from $25 a month | Cloud, self-host |
| Xata | Branching and scale to zero like Neon | From $0.012 an hour; open source self-host | AWS, GCP, BYOC, self-host |
| Prisma Postgres | Predictable bills with hard spend limits | Free; Starter $10 a month | Cloud |
| PlanetScale Postgres | Production Postgres on fast NVMe storage | From $5 a month | Cloud |
| Amazon Aurora DSQL | Serverless, distributed Postgres on AWS | Free tier; $8 per 1M DPUs | AWS |
| Render Postgres | App and database on one host | Free instance; paid from $6 a month | Cloud |
Supabase
Supabase wraps a full Postgres database with authentication, file storage, auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs, realtime subscriptions and edge functions. If you paired Neon with a separate auth provider and storage bucket, Supabase replaces all three. The core is open source and can be self-hosted.
The Supabase pricing page lists a free plan with 50,000 monthly active users, 500 MB of database per project and 2 active projects. Pro starts at $25 a month with 8 GB of disk, 100,000 MAUs and $10 of compute credits, enough for one Micro instance. Team is from $599 a month and adds SOC 2, SSO and 14-day backups.
Best for: App developers who want the database and backend services from one vendor.
Pricing:
- Free: $0, 2 active projects, 500 MB database each
- Pro: from $25 a month; extra projects from $10 a month
- Team: from $599 a month
- Enterprise: custom
Watch out for:
- "Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity", per the pricing page, so a hobby app that sits idle goes offline until you restore it.
Official site: Supabase.
Xata
Xata is built around the same ideas that made Neon popular: copy-on-write branches of a Postgres database and compute that sleeps when idle. The Xata pricing page lists branching and scale to zero on every option, with about 1 second to wake on its cloud and about 10 seconds self-hosted.
There are three ways to run it. The open source version is free to self-host. Xata Cloud on AWS or GCP bills by the hour, from $0.012 an hour ($9 a month) for a micro instance up to $1.536 an hour for 8xlarge, plus $0.28 per GB-month of storage. A bring-your-own-cloud option is priced as a percentage of managed spend.
Best for: Teams that rely on Neon-style database branches for previews and tests.
Pricing:
- Open source: free, self-hosted
- Xata Cloud: from $0.012 an hour (micro, $9 a month), plus $0.28 per GB-month storage
- BYOC: quote, as a percentage of managed spend
Watch out for:
- The pricing page lists no free tier for Xata Cloud, only a sign-up with no card required, so a free hobby database means self-hosting.
Official site: Xata.
Prisma Postgres
Prisma, known for its TypeScript ORM, also runs a managed Postgres service. Its pricing model is the main difference from Neon. You pay for database operations and storage, not compute hours, and every paid plan has a hard spend limit, so a traffic spike cannot produce a surprise bill.
The Prisma pricing page lists Free at 200k operations, 2 GB and 50 databases with no card. Starter is $10 a month for 1M operations and 10 GB, Pro is $49 for 10M operations and 50 GB, and Business is $129 for 50M operations and 100 GB with 30-day backups. Data transfer is unlimited on all plans.
Best for: Small teams and side projects that want a fixed monthly ceiling.
Pricing:
- Free: 200k operations, 2 GB, 50 databases
- Starter: $10 a month, 1M operations; $8 per extra million
- Pro: $49 a month, 10M operations; $2 per extra million
- Business: $129 a month, 50M operations; $1 per extra million
Watch out for:
- Operation-based billing is hard to estimate for chatty apps. Overage on Starter is $8 per extra million operations, four times the Pro rate.
Official site: Prisma Postgres.
PlanetScale Postgres
PlanetScale made its name with Vitess, a sharded MySQL. It now sells Postgres too, aimed at production workloads. The PlanetScale pricing page lists single-node Postgres from $5 a month, high-availability clusters with one primary and two replicas across three availability zones, and Metal instances on local NVMe storage from $50 a month.
For very large databases there is Neki, PlanetScale's sharded Postgres, priced by shard size, count, routers, replicas and storage. Billing is pay as you go with no contract on the Base plan.
Best for: Growing products that need steady Postgres performance and replicas more than scale to zero.
Pricing:
- Single node: from $5 a month
- High availability: priced by cluster size
- Metal: from $50 a month
- Enterprise: contact sales
Watch out for:
- The pricing page lists no free tier, so every development or preview database is a paid instance, starting at $5 a month.
Official site: PlanetScale Postgres.
Amazon Aurora DSQL
Aurora DSQL is AWS's serverless, distributed SQL database with a PostgreSQL-compatible interface. There are no instances to size. You pay for distributed processing units and storage, and the cluster scales on its own, which makes it the AWS-native answer to Neon's pay-per-use model.
The Aurora DSQL pricing page says the first 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB of storage each month are free. Beyond that, 1M DPUs cost $8 in US East (Ohio), and its examples bill storage at $0.33 per GB-month.
Best for: AWS teams that want serverless Postgres-style SQL without managing instances.
Pricing:
- Free tier: 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB storage per month
- Compute: $8 per 1M DPUs in US East (Ohio)
- Storage: $0.33 per GB-month in the pricing examples
Watch out for:
- It is not full Postgres. AWS's compatibility page lists no triggers, no PL/pgSQL, no temporary tables, one DDL statement per transaction and a 3,000-row limit per transaction.
- Optimistic concurrency means conflicting transactions fail at commit, so your app needs retry logic.
Official site: Amazon Aurora DSQL.
Render Postgres
Render hosts web services, workers, cron jobs and Postgres in one dashboard, which suits a team that used Neon only because its app host had no database. Point-in-time recovery is built in, with a 3-day window on the Hobby workspace and 7 days on Pro and above.
The Render pricing page lists a free Postgres instance with 256 MB of RAM and 100 connections. Paid instances start at $6 a month for less than one CPU and 256 MB, and storage expands at $0.30 per GB.
Best for: Small apps that want the code and the database on the same platform.
Pricing:
- Free instance: $0, 256 MB RAM, 100 connections
- Paid: from $6 a month
- Storage: $0.30 per GB
Watch out for:
- Instances are fixed sizes. Render lists no autoscaling or scale to zero for them, so you pay for the instance even when traffic is zero.
Official site: Render Postgres.
How to choose
| If you need | Pick |
|---|---|
| Database, auth and storage in one service | Supabase |
| Database branches for every pull request | Xata |
| A hard monthly spend limit | Prisma Postgres |
| Production Postgres with replicas across zones | PlanetScale Postgres |
| Pay-per-use SQL inside AWS | Amazon Aurora DSQL |
| App hosting and Postgres together | Render Postgres |
When to stay with Neon
Stay on Neon if branching and scale to zero are why you chose it and the Databricks ownership does not worry you. The free plan's 100 projects and 10 branches each are still generous, Launch has no monthly minimum, and Scale lets you set suspend time from 1 minute to always on. Few rivals match that mix for preview environments.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns Neon now?
Databricks. Neon announced on May 14, 2025 that it would join Databricks, and the Neon pricing page now presents the service as "from Databricks", built around Lakebase Postgres.
Is Neon still free?
Yes. The free plan includes 100 CU-hours per project, 1 GB per project (20 GB per account), 100 projects and 10 branches per project. Compute suspends after 5 minutes idle, and on the free plan that cannot be turned off.
Is Supabase better than Neon?
For full apps, often yes, because it bundles auth, storage and APIs. For pure database work with many short-lived branches, Neon or Xata fit better.
What are the alternatives to Neon One (Neon CRM)?
Neon One makes Neon CRM, a donor management system for small and midsize nonprofits that starts at $99 a month and is priced on revenue rather than contacts. Donor CRMs such as Bloomerang and Little Green Light are the usual comparisons, and grant tools like Foundant or SmartSimple suit organisations that mainly manage grants.
