# Aiven vs Neon

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-neon/

Every value below is read from Aiven's and Neon's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Aiven | Neon |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off | Yes |
| 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. | No fixed monthly fee. Launch is usage-based — Neon's own worked example puts typical spend at $15/month for intermittent load on 1 GB — so there is no entry price to compare, only a rate card. Recorded without a magnitude because a vendor's spend estimate is not a price. |
| 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. | Usage-based with no minimum monthly fee on paid plans: $0.106/CU-hour compute and $0.35/GB-month storage on Launch, $0.222/CU-hour on Scale |
| Managed connection pooling | Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers | Supported |
| 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. | 8 AWS regions: N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Frankfurt, London, Singapore, Sydney, São Paulo. A project's region is fixed at creation and cannot be changed. |
| 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. | PostgreSQL |
| Connection limit | 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. | Scales with compute size: 104 direct connections at 0.25 CU (1 GB RAM), 419 at 1 CU, 2517 at 6 CU; up to 10,000 through the pooler |
| Database branching | Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write | Supported |
| 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. | History window of 6 hours up to 1 GB-month on Free, up to 7 days on Launch, up to 30 days on Scale |
| Read replicas | Supported | Supported |
| 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 day of history on paid plans by default and 6 hours on Free, configurable up to 7 days on Launch or 30 days on Scale. Neon notes that widening the window raises storage cost, so the ceiling is a paid choice rather than an included allowance. |

## Where they differ

### 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing))
- Neon: No fixed monthly fee. Launch is usage-based — Neon's own worked example puts typical spend at $15/month for intermittent load on 1 GB — so there is no entry price to compare, only a rate card. Recorded without a magnitude because a vendor's spend estimate is not a price. ([source](https://neon.com/pricing))

### 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing))
- Neon: Usage-based with no minimum monthly fee on paid plans: $0.106/CU-hour compute and $0.35/GB-month storage on Launch, $0.222/CU-hour on Scale ([source](https://neon.com/docs/introduction/plans))

### 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/reference/list_of_clouds))
- Neon: 8 AWS regions: N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Frankfurt, London, Singapore, Sydney, São Paulo. A project's region is fixed at creation and cannot be changed. ([source](https://neon.com/docs/introduction/regions))

### 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql))
- Neon: PostgreSQL ([source](https://neon.com/docs/connect/connection-pooling))

### 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/reference/pg-connection-limits))
- Neon: Scales with compute size: 104 direct connections at 0.25 CU (1 GB RAM), 419 at 1 CU, 2517 at 6 CU; up to 10,000 through the pooler ([source](https://neon.com/docs/connect/connection-pooling))

### Database branching

- Aiven: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/howto/fork-service))
- Neon: Supported ([source](https://neon.com/docs/introduction/plans))

### 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups))
- Neon: History window of 6 hours up to 1 GB-month on Free, up to 7 days on Launch, up to 30 days on Scale ([source](https://neon.com/docs/introduction/plans))

### 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups))
- Neon: 1 day of history on paid plans by default and 6 hours on Free, configurable up to 7 days on Launch or 30 days on Scale. Neon notes that widening the window raises storage cost, so the ceiling is a paid choice rather than an included allowance. ([source](https://neon.com/docs/introduction/point-in-time-restore))

## Which should you choose?

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 Neon if Workloads that are idle most of the time, and teams who want a real database per pull request. Compute suspends after five minutes and storage is billed separately, so a staging branch costs almost nothing while nobody is using it.

Consider something else: 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.

Consider something else: Neon — You need predictable monthly billing. Usage pricing with no minimum fee cuts both ways, and a runaway query on an autoscaling compute is billed at the rate it ran.

## Documented by only one

- Egress over allowance: Neon: 5 GB per project included on Free; 500 GB per project included on Launch and Scale, then $0.10/GB
- Storage (entry plan): Neon: No included allowance on the Launch plan; storage is metered at $0.35/GB-month. The Free plan includes 0.5 GB per project.
- Scales to zero: Neon: Supported
- When idle: Neon: Compute suspends after 5 minutes idle on Free and Launch, and can be disabled on Launch; configurable from 1 minute to always-on on Scale. The database is not deleted or paused — the next query restarts the compute.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Aiven or Neon?**

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.
Neon: No fixed monthly fee. Launch is usage-based — Neon's own worked example puts typical spend at $15/month for intermittent load on 1 GB — so there is no entry price to compare, only a rate card. Recorded without a magnitude because a vendor's spend estimate is not a price.

**Should I choose Aiven or Neon?**

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 Neon if Workloads that are idle most of the time, and teams who want a real database per pull request. Compute suspends after five minutes and storage is billed separately, so a staging branch costs almost nothing while nobody is using it.