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Aiven vs Amazon RDS

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Aiven and Amazon RDS built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 31 criteria comparedSources last checked

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 RDS if…

Teams already inside AWS, where the database sitting in the same VPC as everything else is worth more than any single feature on this page. Six engines, up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery, and read replicas you create and delete yourself.

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 RDS: You want a database per pull request. RDS documents no branching, and replicas are manual — AWS states outright that it does not autoscale them.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Aiven alternatives · Amazon RDS alternatives

15 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Aiven documentationVisit Amazon RDS documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionAivenAmazon RDS
Pricing
Free tier
Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
Kind of free offerAlways freeIntroductory free tier
When the free offer endsNever — free services have no time limitations.6 months from account creation.
Entry paid plan$5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12.$0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.
Pricing modelFixed 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.On-Demand DB instance hours billed per second with a 10-minute minimum, plus provisioned storage, backup storage and data transfer; Reserved Instances discount 1- or 3-year commitments.
Execution
Managed connection poolingSupported — not on the Free or Developer tiersSupported
Infrastructure
Regions153 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.39 geographic regions and 124 Availability Zones across the AWS Cloud — AWS-wide footprint; the RDS User Guide lists RDS Regions individually and publishes no total.
Uptime SLA
99.99% from Startup ($75/month), the entry paid plan, upward.
99.95% for a Multi-AZ DB instance or cluster; 99.5% for a single DB instance, which is what you get without enabling Multi-AZ. Both are service-credit thresholds.
Data
EnginePostgreSQL, 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.PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2. Each engine is a separate RDS product with its own version list and its own feature support, so a capability documented for one is not a capability of RDS as a whole.
Connection limitSet per plan, not by a formula: 100 on the entry paid plan (Startup-4), rising to 200, 400, 800 and 1000 as the plan grows, with 25 on Hobbyist, 20 on Free and 15 on Developer. Aiven states plainly that it does not apply a per-GiB formula, and that some of the allowance is used by Aiven itself to manage the service.Not a fixed number: RDS for PostgreSQL sets max_connections by formula from the instance's memory — LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392}, 5000) — so a bigger instance class gets more connections and the ceiling is 5,000 however large it is. The parameter can be set by hand anywhere from 6 to 262,143, which is a limit on what you may configure rather than what an instance will serve. Other engines use different divisors: MySQL is memory/12582880 with no cap.
Point-in-time recoveryBounded 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 configured backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Transaction logs are uploaded to S3 every five minutes, which is what bounds how close to now the latest restorable time can be.
Read replicasSupportedSupported — 15 per primary, raisable on request
Backup retentionBy 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.Between 0 and 35 days, set per DB instance; 0 disables automated backups entirely. The default depends on how the instance was created — one day via the API or CLI, seven days via the console — so there is no single default to quote. Multi-AZ DB clusters cannot be set below 1 day.
Compliance
SOC 2We also provide ISAE 3000/SOC2 Type II reports.Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
HIPAAOur services are ISO 27000-series, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant.Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.
Encryption at restAll data is fully encrypted end-to-end at rest and in transit.AES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.
Private networking / VPCDeploy services directly into your own cloud account for data residency and VPC peering.DB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Free tier

Aiven
Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
Amazon RDS
No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
Sources (2) →
  • Free plans — Aiven docs ↗

    “You don't need a credit card to create a free service and you can use them indefinitely free of charge. Free services do not have any time limitations. However, Aiven reserves the right to: Power off free services with no initial usage within the first few hours after the service is running. [...] Power off free services with no continuative activity on the service.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Amazon RDS Free Tier ↗

    “With Free plan, you can explore Aurora and RDS for up to 6 months without any commitments or cost. [...] If you activated your free tier account prior to July 15th, 2025, you can continue to use select RDS instances for free up to 12 months after your sign-up date.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

Kind of free offer

Aiven
Always free
Amazon RDS
Introductory free tier
Sources (2) →
  • Free plans — Aiven docs ↗

    “You don't need a credit card to create a free service and you can use them indefinitely free of charge. Free services do not have any time limitations. However, Aiven reserves the right to: Power off free services with no initial usage within the first few hours after the service is running. [...] Power off free services with no continuative activity on the service.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Amazon RDS Free Tier ↗

    “With Free plan, you can explore Aurora and RDS for up to 6 months without any commitments or cost. [...] If you activated your free tier account prior to July 15th, 2025, you can continue to use select RDS instances for free up to 12 months after your sign-up date.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

When the free offer ends

Aiven
Never — free services have no time limitations.
Amazon RDS
6 months from account creation.
Sources (2) →
  • Aiven free plan ↗

    “You don't need a credit card to create a free service and you can use them indefinitely free of charge. Free services do not have any time limitations.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Amazon RDS Free Tier ↗

    “With Free plan, you can explore Aurora and RDS for up to 6 months without any commitments or cost.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

Entry paid plan

Aiven
$5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12.
Amazon RDS
$0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.
Sources (2) →
  • Plans & Pricing — Aiven ↗

    “Free $0 / month [...] 1 GB total storage Cannot select a specific cloud or region No integrations or connection pooling Developer $5 / month [...] 8 GB total storage Cannot select a specific cloud or region No integrations or connection pooling Hobbyist starting from $12 / month $0.02 / hour [...] Startup starting from $75 / month $0.10 / hour [...] 99.99% uptime SLA Business starting from $180 / month $0.25 / hour”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Amazon RDS for MySQL price feed, US East (N. Virginia) — the data aws.amazon.com/rds/mysql/pricing/ loads into its rate tables ↗

    “"Instance Type":"db.t4g.micro","LeaseContractLength":"1yr","plc:LeaseContractLength":"1 year","PurchaseOption":"No Upfront","Location":"US East (N. Virginia)","Database Engine":"MySQL","OnDemand:InstanceType":"db.t4g.micro","OnDemand:Location":"US East (N. Virginia)","OnDemand:PricePerUnit":"0.0160000000"”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

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 RDS
On-Demand DB instance hours billed per second with a 10-minute minimum, plus provisioned storage, backup storage and data transfer; Reserved Instances discount 1- or 3-year commitments.
Sources (2) →
  • 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 · Report a correction

  • Amazon RDS for MySQL pricing ↗

    “Option to pay as you go with no upfront fees or minimum commitments with On-Demand or Reserved Instances at a discounted rate. Pay only for what you use. [...] On-Demand database (DB) Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour your DB instance runs. [...] Amazon RDS for MySQL supports per-second billing in which partial DB instance hours consumed are billed in one-second increments with a 10-minute minimum.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

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 RDS
39 geographic regions and 124 Availability Zones across the AWS Cloud — AWS-wide footprint; the RDS User Guide lists RDS Regions individually and publishes no total.
Sources (2) →

Uptime SLA

Aiven

99.99% from Startup ($75/month), the entry paid plan, upward.

Amazon RDS

99.95% for a Multi-AZ DB instance or cluster; 99.5% for a single DB instance, which is what you get without enabling Multi-AZ. Both are service-credit thresholds.

Sources (2) →
  • Aiven Pricing ↗

    “startup starting from $75 / month $0.10 / hour get building view 7 plans 1 dedicated VM 2-32 CPU per VM 4-192 GB RAM per VM 80 GB-11 TB total storage 99.99% uptime SLA”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Amazon RDS Service Level Agreement ↗

    “make each Multi-AZ DB Instance and each Multi-AZ DB Cluster available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage [...] Less than 99.95% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10% [...] make each Single-DB Instance available with an Instance-Level Uptime Percentage [...] Less than 99.5% but equal to or greater than 99.0% 10%”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official site · Report a correction

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 RDS
PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2. Each engine is a separate RDS product with its own version list and its own feature support, so a capability documented for one is not a capability of RDS as a whole.
Sources (2) →

Connection limit

Aiven
Set per plan, not by a formula: 100 on the entry paid plan (Startup-4), rising to 200, 400, 800 and 1000 as the plan grows, with 25 on Hobbyist, 20 on Free and 15 on Developer. Aiven states plainly that it does not apply a per-GiB formula, and that some of the allowance is used by Aiven itself to manage the service.
Amazon RDS
Not a fixed number: RDS for PostgreSQL sets max_connections by formula from the instance's memory — LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392}, 5000) — so a bigger instance class gets more connections and the ceiling is 5,000 however large it is. The parameter can be set by hand anywhere from 6 to 262,143, which is a limit on what you may configure rather than what an instance will serve. Other engines use different divisors: MySQL is memory/12582880 with no cap.
Sources (2) →

Point-in-time recovery

Aiven
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.
Amazon RDS
Any point inside the configured backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Transaction logs are uploaded to S3 every five minutes, which is what bounds how close to now the latest restorable time can be.
Sources (2) →

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 RDS
Between 0 and 35 days, set per DB instance; 0 disables automated backups entirely. The default depends on how the instance was created — one day via the API or CLI, seven days via the console — so there is no single default to quote. Multi-AZ DB clusters cannot be set below 1 day.
Sources (2) →
  • 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 · Report a correction

  • Backup retention period — Amazon Relational Database Service User Guide ↗

    “If you create a DB instance using the Amazon RDS API or the AWS CLI and if you don't set the backup retention period, the default backup retention period is one day. If you create a DB instance using the console, the default backup retention period is seven days. [...] You can set the backup retention period of a DB instance to between 0 and 35 days. Setting the backup retention period to 0 disables automated backups. For a Multi-AZ DB cluster, you can set the backup retention period to between 1 and 35 days.”

    Read 2026-09-09 · official docs · Report a correction

SOC 2

Aiven
We also provide ISAE 3000/SOC2 Type II reports.
Amazon RDS
Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Sources (2) →

HIPAA

Aiven
Our services are ISO 27000-series, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant.
Amazon RDS
Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.
Sources (2) →

Encryption at rest

Aiven
All data is fully encrypted end-to-end at rest and in transit.
Amazon RDS
AES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.
Sources (2) →

Private networking / VPC

Aiven
Deploy services directly into your own cloud account for data residency and VPC peering.
Amazon RDS
DB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

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 — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

Credit card to startAiven: No
Startup credit programAiven: Aiven for Startups: $12,000–$100,000 in Aiven credits over 12 months. Requires founded ≤7 years ago and external funding from pre-seed to Series B.
Storage (entry plan)Amazon RDS: Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).
Memory (entry plan)Amazon RDS: 1 GiB of memory and 2 vCPU on the db.t4g.micro DB instance class, the smallest burstable class listed in the RDS hardware specifications.
When idleAmazon RDS: A DB instance can be stopped for at most 7 consecutive days, with no instance-hour charges while stopped but provisioned storage and backups still billed; RDS then starts it automatically.
Database branchingAiven: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write
Rewind in placeAmazon RDS: Not supported — Point-in-time restore creates a new DB instance without modifying the source; no in-place rewind.
Support on entry paid planAiven: Documentation on the free tier; email with best-effort same or next business day responses on paid plans. Faster responses and phone support are three further tiers, charged separately.
ISO 27001Amazon RDS: Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.Aiven: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-22 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Aiven.
GDPR / data residencyAmazon RDS: AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.Aiven: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Aiven.
PCI DSSAmazon RDS: Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.Aiven: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-22 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Aiven.
Customer-managed keysAmazon RDS: An encrypted DB instance can use a customer managed AWS KMS key instead of the AWS managed key, with key policies and CloudTrail auditing in AWS KMS.Aiven: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-22 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Aiven.
Role-based access controlAmazon RDS: AWS IAM identity-based policies, roles and managed policies control access to RDS resources; IAM database authentication is available for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Dedicated infrastructureAmazon RDS: A DB instance can run in a VPC whose instance tenancy is set to dedicated, restricted to approved EC2 dedicated instance types; a dedicated host is not guaranteed.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Aiven or Amazon RDS?

Aiven: $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12.

Amazon RDS: $0.016 per DB instance-hour on-demand for db.t4g.micro, the smallest DB instance class — RDS for MySQL, Single-AZ, US East (N. Virginia). No plan fee or minimum: instance-hours, storage and backups are billed separately. Cheapest of the 216 on-demand rates in this feed; db.t3.micro is next at $0.017.

Free tier: Aiven or Amazon RDS?

Aiven: Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off

Amazon RDS: No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.

Should I choose Aiven or Amazon RDS?

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 RDS if Teams already inside AWS, where the database sitting in the same VPC as everything else is worth more than any single feature on this page. Six engines, up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery, and read replicas you create and delete yourself.

Provider pages

AivenManaged open-source data services across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, including PostgreSQL on plans that differ by node count and backup history.Amazon RDSAWS managed relational database service running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2 on provisioned DB instances.

Related comparisons

Aiven vs Amazon AuroraAiven vs Crunchy BridgeAiven vs NeonAiven vs TigerDataAiven vs TursoAmazon RDS vs Amazon AuroraAmazon RDS vs NileAmazon RDS vs PlanetScale

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.