PlanetScale vs Mixpanel
Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
vs. Enterprise product analytics — behavioral cohorts + funnels + A/B
Pricing tiers
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
Mixpanel
Free
1M events/month cap. Unlimited seats, 5 saved reports, 10K session replays/month. No credit card.
Free
Growth
Usage-based. First 1M events free, then $0.28 per 1K events (volume discounts). 20K session replays/mo.
$0 base (usage-based)
Startup Program
First year free for <5-year companies with <$8M funding.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. Unlimited events. Experiments + feature flags. HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II. 24/7 support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale vs free on Mixpanel.
| Metric | PlanetScale | Mixpanel |
|---|---|---|
| ha | 0 nodes | — |
| ram mib | 512 MiB | — |
Features
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.
Mixpanel · 13 features
- Alerts — Anomaly + threshold alerts on metrics.
- Campaign Reporting — UTM + multi-touch attribution reporting.
- Cohorts — Dynamic user segments from event behavior + properties.
- Dashboards — Multi-report dashboards with slices.
- Data Governance — Property schemas, approvals, lineage. Enterprise only.
- Data Warehouse Connectors — Sync from/to Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift.
- Experiments (A/B) — Feature-flag-backed experiments. Enterprise only.
- Feature Flags — Targeting + rollouts. Enterprise tier.
- Flows — User path visualization (where do users go).
- Funnels — Conversion step-by-step analysis with drop-off + time-to-convert.
- Insights (Reports) — Ad-hoc exploration with filters, breakdowns, math operators.
- Retention — N-day retention curves segmented by cohort.
- Session Replay — Record + watch user sessions tied to events.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | PlanetScale | Mixpanel |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) | — |
| SDK | @planetscale/database | mixpanel-android, mixpanel-js (browser), mixpanel-node, mixpanel-python, mixpanel-react-native, Mixpanel-swift (iOS) |
| REST | Management API | Mixpanel Ingestion API, Query API |
| MCP | PlanetScale MCP | — |
| OTHER | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol | — |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to PlanetScale and Mixpanel are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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