Aiven vs Amazon Aurora
SEPT 2026 auditA comparison of Aiven and Amazon Aurora built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.
The short answer
Choose Aiven if…
Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Choose Amazon Aurora if…
Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Consider something else if…
- Aiven: You want long recovery history on a cheap plan. Backup history is what the plan tiers buy here: two days on the entry paid plan against thirty at the top.
- Amazon Aurora: You want the upstream database rather than a compatible one, or a branch workflow rather than a clone. AWS documents cloning as a way to build a test environment, not as something you do per pull request.
5 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.
Pick the criteria you care about. The chart counts how many of them lean toward each provider — the same read as scanning the bars below, just totalled for the ones you chose.
Aiven 0
Amazon Aurora 0
At a glance.
| Criterion | Aiven | Amazon Aurora |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Free tier | Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off | Yes — capped Free plan plus time-limited credits |
| Pricing model | Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. | Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend. |
| Infrastructure | ||
| Regions | 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. | 34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total. |
| Data | ||
| Engine | PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. | MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database. |
| Database branching | Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write | Limited — clones, not a branch workflow |
| Point-in-time recovery | Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first. | Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken. |
| Read replicas | Supported | Supported — 15 per cluster, a quota AWS will not raise |
| Backup retention | By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. | 1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off. |
Where they differ.
Pricing model
- Aiven
- Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second.
- Amazon Aurora
- Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Plans & Pricing — Aiven ↗
“Aiven's pricing is all-inclusive and transparent, providing you with the confidence [...] Startup starting from $75 / month $0.10 / hour [...] Business starting from $180 / month $0.25 / hour [...] Everything in Startup, plus high availability Premium starting from $270 / month $0.37 / hour”
Read 2026-09-09 · official pricing
- Amazon Aurora pricing — Amazon Web Services ↗
“Aurora charges for database instances and storage, along with any optional features you choose to enable. Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL offer On-Demand and Reserved Instance pricing. [...] We want to calculate the compute costs of running this workload on Aurora serverless with the database cluster configured as Aurora Standard and Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia). [...] 5 ACUs * $0.12 per ACU-hour * 30/60 hour $0.30 [...] 5 ACUs * $0.156 per ACU-hour * 30/60 hour $0.39”
Read 2026-09-09 · official pricing
Regions
- Aiven
- 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific.
- Amazon Aurora
- 34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Available cloud regions — Aiven docs ↗
“This is a reference list of the default cloud regions available per provider on the Aiven Platform. note The list of available clouds can differ per project. Not all Aiven service types are available for all cloud providers and regions.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Regions and Availability Zones — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗
“Aurora MySQL Region availability The following table shows the AWS Regions where Aurora MySQL is currently available and the endpoint for each Region. Region Name Region Endpoint Protocol US East (Ohio) us-east-2 rds.us-east-2.amazonaws.com HTTPS US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 rds.us-east-1.amazonaws.com HTTPS [...] Aurora PostgreSQL Region availability”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
Engine
- Aiven
- PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail.
- Amazon Aurora
- MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Aiven for PostgreSQL® — Aiven docs ↗
“Aiven for PostgreSQL is the perfect fit for your relational data. A scalable SQL database solution that can be up and running within a few minutes. [...] Find a comprehensive per-release documentation on the PostgreSQL project website.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- What is Amazon Aurora? — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗
“Amazon Aurora (Aurora) is a fully managed relational database engine that's compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. [...] The code, tools, and applications you use today with your existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases can be used with Aurora.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
Point-in-time recovery
Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first.
Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Aiven for PostgreSQL® backups — Aiven docs ↗
“Aiven for PostgreSQL® databases are automatically backed up, with full backups made daily, and write-ahead logs (WAL) copied at 5 minute intervals, or for every new file generated. All backups are encrypted using pghoard, an open source tool developed and maintained by Aiven.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Backing up and restoring an Aurora DB cluster — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗
“Aurora automated backups are continuous and incremental, so you can quickly restore to any point within the backup retention period. No performance impact or interruption of database service occurs as backup data is being written.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
Backup retention
- Aiven
- By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here.
- Amazon Aurora
- 1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Aiven for PostgreSQL® backups — Aiven docs ↗
“Backup retention time by plan The number of stored backups and the backup retention time depends on the service plan that you have selected. Plan Type Backup Retention Time Hobbyist None Startup 2 days Business 14 days Premium 30 days”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Backing up and restoring an Aurora DB cluster — Amazon Aurora User Guide ↗
“Aurora backs up your cluster volume automatically and retains restore data for the length of the backup retention period. [...] You can specify a backup retention period from 1–35 days when you create or modify a DB cluster.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.
Documented by only one.
These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing.
Questions this comparison answers.
Should I choose Aiven or Amazon Aurora?
Pick Aiven if Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.
Pick Amazon Aurora if Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.