Langfuse vs PlanetScale
Open-source LLM engineering platform — observability, prompts, evals
vs. Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
Pricing tiers
Langfuse
Hobby (Cloud Free)
Free. 50k units/month included. 30 days data access. 2 users. Community support.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
MIT-licensed. Docker Compose or Kubernetes deployment. Unlimited.
$0 base (usage-based)
Core
$29/month. 100k units included ($8 per 100k overage). 90 days retention. Unlimited users. In-app support.
$29/mo
Pro
$199/month. 100k units included + same overage. 3 YEARS retention. Unlimited annotation queues. High rate limits.
$199/mo
Teams Add-on
+$300/month. Adds Enterprise SSO + fine-grained RBAC + dedicated Slack support to Pro.
$300/mo
Enterprise
$2,499/month. Everything + custom rate limits, uptime SLA, dedicated support engineer. Yearly options.
$2499/mo
PlanetScale
Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5
Single-node EBS, 512 MiB RAM, arm64. Entry point for Postgres.
$5/mo
Postgres EBS HA — PS-5
3-node (primary + 2 replicas), 512 MiB, arm64.
$15/mo
Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10
Vitess MySQL sharded cluster, 1 GiB RAM.
$39/mo
Postgres Metal — M-10
3-node Metal, 1 GiB RAM + 10 GiB local storage. Much higher IOPS.
$50/mo
Vitess Metal — M-160
Vitess Metal, 16 GiB RAM + 110 GiB storage.
$609/mo
Enterprise
Custom agreements, dedicated regions, 99.99% SLA.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing hobby on Langfuse vs pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale.
| Metric | Langfuse | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| ha | — | 0 nodes |
| ram mib | — | 512 MiB |
Features
Langfuse · 16 features
- Annotation Queues — Human reviewers rate traces. Unlimited on Pro+.
- Dashboards — Aggregate metrics, cost, quality across projects.
- Datasets — Curate test sets from production traces. Run experiments.
- EU Cloud Region — GDPR-compliant hosting in EU.
- Evaluations — LLM-as-judge, manual scores, custom model-graded evaluators.
- LLM Cost Tracking — Automatic cost calculation per provider/model.
- OpenTelemetry Native — OTel SDK → Langfuse endpoint works out of box.
- Playground — Test prompts + models + variables live.
- Prompt Management — Version, tag, label prompts. Reference from code by label.
- Public API — Full REST API for ingest, query, prompt management.
- Python @observe decorator — One-line decorator to trace any function.
- Self-Hosting — Docker Compose + k8s Helm chart.
- Sessions — Group related traces (conversations, agent runs).
- Tracing — Capture every LLM call, tool call, nested span with inputs/outputs/cost.
- Users Tracking — Segment traces by user ID, track per-user cost.
- Webhooks — Subscribe to trace completion events.
PlanetScale · 12 features
- Backups — Automated daily backups with retention.
- Database Branching — Git-like branches of your DB schema (not data). Create, diff, merge via deploy r…
- Deploy Requests — Schema changes in a feature branch get reviewed + auto-applied to main with zero…
- HIPAA — HIPAA-compliant deployments (Enterprise).
- Metal (NVMe) — Dedicated NVMe local storage. 10x IOPS vs EBS, latency-critical workloads.
- PgBouncer Pooler — Managed PgBouncer for Postgres clusters. Optional dedicated pooler.
- PlanetScale Boost — Query result cache with sub-ms reads.
- Point-in-Time Recovery — Restore cluster to any point within retention window.
- Postgres on PlanetScale — PostgreSQL 15+ with the same branching + deploy-request flow. Launched 2024.
- Query Insights — Per-query performance analytics, slow query tracking, explain plans.
- Read-only Regions — Route reads to the nearest region for lower latency.
- Vitess (MySQL at scale) — Horizontally-sharded MySQL (YouTube-scale) — original PlanetScale offering.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Langfuse | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) |
| SDK | langfuse-js, langfuse-python | @planetscale/database |
| REST | Langfuse REST API | Management API |
| MCP | Langfuse MCP Server | PlanetScale MCP |
| OTHER | Langfuse Dashboard, OpenTelemetry endpoint | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Langfuse and PlanetScale are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.