shadcn/ui vs Neon
Beautifully designed React components you copy-paste into your app
vs. Serverless Postgres with branching and bottomless storage
Pricing tiers
shadcn/ui
OSS (MIT)
$0. MIT license. Free forever. No signup. Components copy-pasted into your repo and owned by you.
$0 base (usage-based)
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)
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing oss on shadcn/ui vs free on Neon.
| Metric | shadcn/ui | Neon |
|---|---|---|
| branches per project | — | 10 branches |
| cu hours per project | — | 100 CU-hours/month |
| egress gb month | — | 5 GB/month |
| pitr retention hours | — | 6 hours |
| projects | — | 100 projects |
| storage gb per project | — | 0.5 GB |
| team members | — | 3 users |
Features
shadcn/ui · 12 features
- 50+ Components — Button, dialog, dropdown, form, table, etc.
- Accessibility — WAI-ARIA compliant.
- Blocks — Full-page layouts ready to use.
- Charts — Composable Recharts wrappers.
- CSS Variables — Themeable via --primary, --background, etc.
- Custom Registries — Publish your own components via registry spec.
- Dark Mode — Built-in toggleable theme.
- Form Components (react-hook-form) — Integrated with react-hook-form + Zod.
- MCP Server — Query component catalog from AI agents.
- Radix UI Primitives — Headless accessibility foundation.
- shadcn CLI — Scaffold + add components.
- Themes + Theme Editor — CSS vars-based color system.
Neon · 14 features
- Autoscaling — Compute scales CPU + memory between min and max CU in seconds based on load.
- Branching — Git-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 Allowlist — Restrict DB access to specific CIDRs. Launch+.
- Launchpad — One-click create-a-database link that can be embedded in OSS repos (DATABASE_URL…
- Logical Replication — Publish changes to Snowflake, BigQuery, Kafka, or other Postgres. Subscribe from…
- Monitoring — Built-in dashboards for CPU/RAM/connections/slow queries. Prometheus export on B…
- Neon Auth — Stack Auth integrated: users table auto-synced into your Postgres (public.users_…
- Point-in-Time Restore — Restore DB to any moment in the retention window (6h free → 30d Scale) via branc…
- Private Networking — AWS PrivateLink / VPC peering. Business plan.
- Read Replicas — Create a read-only compute endpoint on the same branch. Zero replication lag (re…
- Scale to Zero — Compute suspends when idle — no charge for compute while paused. Cold-start ~300…
- Schema Diff — Compare schema between branches — build PR checks and preview migrations safely.
- SQL over HTTP — Serverless driver lets you query Postgres over HTTPS — works in edge runtimes (V…
Developer interfaces
| Kind | shadcn/ui | Neon |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | shadcn CLI | Neon CLI |
| SDK | — | @neondatabase/serverless |
| REST | Component Registry | Management / Control Plane API, Neon Data API (REST), SQL over HTTP |
| MCP | shadcn MCP Server | Neon MCP Server |
| OTHER | Docs + Component Browser, Theme Customizer | Postgres Wire Protocol |
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