Shopify vs PlanetScale
Dominant SaaS commerce platform — Online Store + Hydrogen headless
vs. Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
Pricing tiers
Shopify
Starter
$5/mo. Sell via social/chat links. No checkout site. Basic.
$5/mo
Basic
$29/mo ($19 annual). Full store. 2.9% + 30¢ online. 2 staff.
$29/mo
Shopify
$79/mo ($49 annual). 2.7% online. 5 staff.
$79/mo
Advanced
$299/mo ($229 annual). 2.5% online. Custom reports. 15 staff.
$299/mo
Plus
$2,300/mo (starting). Enterprise features, checkout customization, unlimited staff.
$2300/mo
Enterprise
Custom. For $1M+ GMV merchants. Dedicated support, Checkout Extensibility.
Custom
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 starter on Shopify vs pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale.
| Metric | Shopify | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| ha | — | 0 nodes |
| ram mib | — | 512 MiB |
Features
Shopify · 22 features
- Admin APIs — REST + GraphQL for management.
- App Store — 8,000+ apps.
- B2B (Plus) — Company accounts + catalogs.
- Checkout — Shopify-managed checkout (PCI-compliant).
- Checkout Extensibility — UI extensions in checkout (Plus).
- Collections — Manual + smart grouping.
- Customers — CRM-lite + B2B (Plus).
- Discounts — Automatic + code-based.
- Hydrogen — React/Remix headless framework.
- Inventory — Multi-location stock.
- Markets — Multi-region selling (currency, language).
- Online Store — Default Liquid-based storefront.
- Orders + Fulfillment — Multi-location fulfillment.
- Oxygen — Edge hosting for Hydrogen (Plus).
- Products + Variants — Full PIM.
- Shipping + Rates — Carrier integrations.
- Shopify Functions — Rust/WASM backend extensions.
- Shopify Payments — First-party payment processor.
- Shop Pay — Accelerated checkout with saved payment.
- Storefront API — GraphQL for custom storefronts.
- Theme Store — First-party + paid themes.
- Webhooks — Event subscriptions.
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 | Shopify | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | shopify CLI | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) |
| SDK | @shopify/admin-api-client, @shopify/hydrogen | @planetscale/database |
| REST | Admin REST API | Management API |
| GRAPHQL | Admin GraphQL API, Storefront API | — |
| MCP | Shopify MCP (unofficial) | PlanetScale MCP |
| OTHER | Liquid Templates, Shopify Admin, Shopify Webhooks | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol |
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