Staxly

Neon vs LangSmith

Serverless Postgres with branching and bottomless storage
vs. LLM observability, testing & evaluation — by LangChain

Neon websiteLangSmith website

Pricing tiers

Neon

Free
100 projects, 0.5 GB storage + 100 CU-hours each. Great for prototypes and preview envs.
Free
Launch
Usage-based, no minimum. Small production workloads. $0.35/GB-month storage, $0.106/CU-hour.
$0 base (usage-based)
Scale
Usage-based, higher compute tier + faster instances ($0.222/CU-hour). Up to 30-day PITR, 1,000 projects.
$0 base (usage-based)
Business
Usage-based with 99.95% SLA, HIPAA available. Private networking $0.01/GB.
$0 base (usage-based)
Neon website

LangSmith

Developer (Free)
Free forever. 5,000 traces/month. 14-day retention. 1 seat. Basic evaluations.
Free
Plus
$39/seat/month. 10k base traces included ($2.50 per 1k overage). Full evaluations, custom dashboards, email support.
$39/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Self-host option, SSO, custom retention, dedicated support.
Custom
LangSmith website

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Neon vs developer on LangSmith.

MetricNeonLangSmith
branches per project10 branches
cu hours per project100 CU-hours/month
egress gb month5 GB/month
pitr retention hours6 hours
projects100 projects
storage gb per project0.5 GB
team members3 users

Features

Neon · 14 features

  • AutoscalingCompute scales CPU + memory between min and max CU in seconds based on load.
  • BranchingGit-like DB branches: copy-on-write snapshots of data + schema. Instant, cheap.
  • Data API (REST)PostgREST-compatible REST endpoint auto-generated from your schema. Uses Postgre
  • IP AllowlistRestrict DB access to specific CIDRs. Launch+.
  • LaunchpadOne-click create-a-database link that can be embedded in OSS repos (DATABASE_URL
  • Logical ReplicationPublish changes to Snowflake, BigQuery, Kafka, or other Postgres. Subscribe from
  • MonitoringBuilt-in dashboards for CPU/RAM/connections/slow queries. Prometheus export on B
  • Neon AuthStack Auth integrated: users table auto-synced into your Postgres (public.users_
  • Point-in-Time RestoreRestore DB to any moment in the retention window (6h free → 30d Scale) via branc
  • Private NetworkingAWS PrivateLink / VPC peering. Business plan.
  • Read ReplicasCreate a read-only compute endpoint on the same branch. Zero replication lag (re
  • Scale to ZeroCompute suspends when idle — no charge for compute while paused. Cold-start ~300
  • Schema DiffCompare schema between branches — build PR checks and preview migrations safely.
  • SQL over HTTPServerless driver lets you query Postgres over HTTPS — works in edge runtimes (V

LangSmith · 14 features

  • AlertsThreshold alerts on latency, cost, eval metrics.
  • Annotation QueuesHuman-review workflows for trace quality rating.
  • Custom DashboardsAggregate metrics dashboards per project/tag.
  • DatasetsCollect examples → use as eval sets or training data.
  • EvaluationsLLM-as-judge, embedding similarity, custom Python evaluators, offline batch eval
  • LangChain IntegrationAuto-trace any LangChain/LangGraph run with env var.
  • LangGraph IntegrationFirst-class trace + eval for LangGraph agents.
  • LLM TracingAutomatic trace every LLM call + tool call + chain step.
  • OpenTelemetry ExportExport traces as OTLP to Datadog/Honeycomb/etc.
  • PlaygroundTest prompts + models inline before deploying.
  • Prompt CanvasVisual prompt editor with live test + eval.
  • Prompt HubPublic + private prompt library with versioning.
  • Self-Hosted (Enterprise)Docker + k8s deployment in your infra.
  • Threads + SessionsGroup traces into conversational sessions.

Developer interfaces

KindNeonLangSmith
CLINeon CLILangSmith CLI
SDK@neondatabase/serverlesslangsmith-js, langsmith-python
RESTManagement / Control Plane API, Neon Data API (REST), SQL over HTTPLangSmith REST API
MCPNeon MCP ServerLangSmith MCP
OTHERPostgres Wire ProtocolLangSmith Dashboard
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Neon and LangSmith are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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