Xata vs PlanetScale
Serverless Postgres with branching, zero-downtime schema changes + OpenAI embeddings
vs. Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
Pricing tiers
Xata
Free
$0. 15GB storage. 10 branches. Unlimited databases. Community support.
Free
Pro
$20/mo + usage. More compute, higher concurrency, priority support.
$20/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SSO, dedicated support, VPC peering, SOC 2.
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 free on Xata vs pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale.
| Metric | Xata | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| ha | — | 0 nodes |
| ram mib | — | 512 MiB |
Features
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.
- pgroll Migrations — Zero-downtime schema evolution via views.
- 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.
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 | Xata | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | pgroll CLI (OSS), xata CLI | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) |
| SDK | @xata.io/client (TS), xata (Python) | @planetscale/database |
| REST | Xata REST API | Management API |
| MCP | — | PlanetScale MCP |
| OTHER | Direct Postgres (pgroll), Xata Dashboard | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol |
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