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Xata.ioUpdated on 2/27/2026
What is PlanetScale: A Review of Serverless Database Features
AHAren Hovsepyan
Feature |  PlanetScale | |
|---|---|---|
Infrastructure, Underlying technology Cloud Infrastructure, database system and underlying egine | Postgres, MySQL, Vitess, Neki, GCP, AWS | |
Serverless Support Serverless and Edge computing support | ||
API | HTTP Connection, JavaScript and Serverless Drivers | |
Edge Functions Serverless functions that run closer to the user, reducing latency and improving performance. | Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge Functions, Netlify Edge Functions | |
Developer Experience | ||
Database type | OLTP | |
Data model Databases store data in models, such as Relational, Columnar or Document based | Relational, SQL | |
CLI Command Line Interface tools that allow developers to perform tasks and manage the tool via the command line. | pscale https://github.com/planetscale/cli | |
Languages, APIs The languages supporting the database and API interface for inter-process communication | Any package/driver supporting MySQL or Postgres Including Prisma, Node.js, Go, Django, C#, and many others | |
Query language Supported query language such as SQL, MQL, PartiQL, | SQL, MySQL variation | |
ACID compliant ACID is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps | ACID compliant | |
Self-hosting Support for self-hosted Database instance | Enterprise customers can opt for PlanetScale Managed, which runs on their own AWS or GCP infrastructure | |
Backups | Automated database backups at no extra cost | |
Security & Compliance Offerings | ||
SOC2 Service Organization Control 2 compliance for managing customer data. | ||
Multi-factor authentication Support of the cloud-hosted database for multi-factor authentication | ||
Encryption Cryptographic security at rest and on transportation level | AES Encription, TLS v1.3 | |
SSO | ||
Monitoring and analytics | ||
Log retention Query log retention usually keeps lofs of operations for debugging and replication purposes | By default, logs are retained for 7 days. Customizable for enterprise. | |
Statistics Tools and APIs for analysing and monitoring of Database performance | Available in the PlanetScale Dashboard, via the API, and the MCP server for monitoring and improving query performance | |
Scalability | ||
Replication and Partitioning | Vitess enables sharded MySQL databases and Neki enables sharded Postgres databases | |
Companies like Cursor, Cash App, and Intercom use PlanetScale to power their most demanding database workloads, doing millions of queries per second on hundreds of terabytes of data.
PlanetScale was founded by the creators of Vitess, the open-source database clustering system originally built at YouTube to scale its main database. PlanetScale now serves as the core maintainers of the open-source Vitess project.
What is PlanetScale?
PlanetScale is the world's fastest and most scalable cloud database platform, offering both Postgres and Vitess (MySQL) databases. PlanetScale delivers exceptional speed and reliability, with blazing-fast NVMe drives that unlock unlimited IOPS, bringing data center performance to the cloud.
PlanetScale Vitess enables MySQL databases to scale horizontally through explicit sharding, providing a shared-nothing architecture that distributes data across thousands of nodes, all accessible via a single database connection. Vitess powers the databases of some of the web's largest properties: Slack, HubSpot, GitHub, Block, Etsy, and more.
PlanetScale Postgres starts at $5/month and gives you a fully managed PostgreSQL cluster built for performance and reliability. High-availability clusters provide automatic failover across three availability zones.
Neki is PlanetScale's next-generation Postgres sharding solution, inspired by everything learned building Vitess. It’s designed from first principles to bring massive scale and reliability to PostgreSQL workloads.
PlanetScale Metal
PlanetScale Metal is the proven, benchmarked-fastest cloud database offering, available on AWS and GCP. Blazing-fast NVMe drives deliver unlimited IOPS, low latency, and the highest possible throughput for your workloads. PlanetScale Metal starts at $50/month for NVMe-backed performance, benchmarked as the fastest Postgres in the cloud.
Query Insights
PlanetScale Query Insights continuously monitors workloads and traffic to detect slow queries, highlight anomalies, surface out-of-memory events, and more. The data surfaced by Query Insights is available via the PlanetScale dashboard and the PlanetScale MCP server, enabling coding agents to make well-informed updates to your application.
Treat your database as code with branching
PlanetScale provides a branch-per-environment workflow. Each branch runs on its own dedicated cluster, enabling teams to streamline schema work and safely iterate without risking production data.
Branching and deploy requests enable zero-downtime schema changes that your team can review before applying. If something goes wrong, you can roll back bad schema changes with no downtime and no data loss.
Combined with query insights, metrics monitoring, automated backups, connection pooling, and buffered failovers, PlanetScale gives developers confidence to move fast with reliable database technology powering their applications.
Conclusion
PlanetScale gives teams an end-to-end database management platform built by the infrastructure engineers behind YouTube, GitHub, Slack, and more.
Performance — PlanetScale Metal runs on the fastest servers available in the cloud. NVMe drives deliver unlimited IOPS and drastically lower latencies compared to Amazon Aurora and GCP Cloud SQL.
Reliability — SLA commitments offer fully online schema changes, automatic failover, and automated backups.
Scalability — Vitess enables horizontal sharding for MySQL. Neki brings the same massive scale to Postgres. Read replicas, automated resharding workflows, and a global edge network let you grow without limits.
Developer experience — Branching, deploy requests, rollbacks, and full database observability with Insights give teams a detailed overview of cluster health with actionable recommendations to make databases faster.
Security and compliance — SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, and PCI DSS 4.0 compliance. Deployment options include PlanetScale Managed on your own AWS or GCP infrastructure, as well as purchasing through the AWS and GCP Marketplaces.
Integrations — Connect with Cloudflare, Fivetran, Airbyte, Hightouch, Datadog, Vantage, Debezium, and more, all backed by best-in-class support.