PlanetScale vs Xata: pricing, quotas & features (2026)
Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
vs. Serverless Postgres with branching, zero-downtime schema changes + OpenAI embeddings
Data sourced from vendor documentation · Last updated June 2026
Summary
PlanetScale and Xata are both dbaas platforms, addressing the same core use case with different implementation philosophies and trade-offs. Both offer a free tier, making it easy to prototype without a credit card. PlanetScale's paid plans start at $5/month, lower than Xata's entry point at $20/month. PlanetScale has a broader documented feature set (12 vs 11 features). Budget-sensitive teams will find PlanetScale easier to justify early on. All pricing and quota data below is sourced from PlanetScale and Xata's official documentation — not generated by AI or estimated.
PlanetScale vs Xata: Comparativa de precios, cuotas y características (2026)
En esta comparativa analizamos PlanetScale y Xata lado a lado — incluyendo precios mensuales, límites del tier gratuito, características técnicas, cuotas de uso (almacenamiento, transferencia, usuarios activos mensuales) y los interfaces de desarrollo disponibles. Todos los datos proceden de la documentación oficial de cada proveedor, no de respuestas generadas por IA.
PlanetScale es una plataforma de la categoría dbaas — Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale. Ofrece 6 tiers de precio: Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5 desde $5/mes, Postgres EBS HA — PS-5 desde $15/mes, Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10 desde $39/mes, Postgres Metal — M-10 desde $50/mes. Su catálogo en Staxly documenta 12 características y 6 interfazes para desarrolladores.
Xata pertenece a la categoría dbaas — Serverless Postgres with branching, zero-downtime schema changes + OpenAI embeddings. Ofrece 3 tiers de precio: Free gratuito, Pro desde $20/mes, Enterprise (personalizado). Su catálogo documenta 11 características y 7 interfazes para desarrolladores.
A continuación encontrarás los tiers de precio completos de ambas plataformas, una matriz de cuotas del tier gratuito (transferencia, almacenamiento, MAU, llamadas a la API y otros límites), el listado completo de características y los interfaces (CLI, SDKs, REST, GraphQL, MCP) disponibles para integrar cada servicio.
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Pricing tiers
PlanetScale
Xata
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale vs free on Xata.
| Metric | PlanetScale | Xata |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Xata · 11 features
- Ask Xata (OpenAI) — Natural language Q&A over data.
- Branching — Copy-on-write DB branches.
- DB Metrics — Query perf + connection metrics.
- Migration GUI — Visual schema change workflow.
- PITR Backups — Point-in-time restore.
- PR Preview Environments — Branch-per-PR with CI integration.
- Search — Built-in full-text search indexing.
- Vanilla Postgres — Unmodified Postgres 15+.
- Vector Search — pgvector-based embeddings + Q&A.
- Xata Copilot — AI SQL + schema assistant.
- pgroll Migrations — Zero-downtime schema evolution via views.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | PlanetScale | Xata |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) | pgroll CLI (OSS), xata CLI |
| SDK | @planetscale/database | @xata.io/client (TS), xata (Python) |
| REST | Management API | Xata REST API |
| MCP | PlanetScale MCP | — |
| OTHER | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol | Direct Postgres (pgroll), Xata Dashboard |
Key takeaways
- Both PlanetScale and Xata offer a free tier — PlanetScale ("Enterprise") and Xata ("Free") — with no credit card required to start.
- The entry-level paid plan is $5/month for PlanetScale (Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5) vs. $20/month for Xata (Pro).
- PlanetScale has a broader documented feature set (12 features) vs. Xata (11 features) in Staxly's catalog.
- Developer integrations differ: only PlanetScale offers MCP.
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