# Aiven vs Prisma Postgres

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-prisma-postgres/

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

## At a glance

| Criterion | Aiven | Prisma Postgres |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 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. | $10/month for Starter. Pro is $49 and Business $129, each including a larger request allowance. |
| 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. | A plan fee plus usage: requests, memory GB-hours, active vCPU-hours and outbound bandwidth are each metered — $1 per million requests beyond the allowance, $0.006 per GB-hour, $0.064 per vCPU-hour, $0.025 per GB out. |
| Startup credit program | 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. | Prisma for Startups: database bill covered up to $10,000 for one year, plus 1:1 guidance. Venture-funded track requires pre-seed/seed/Series-A funding raised in the last 12 months and founded in the last 5 years; bootstrapped track requires ≥5k MRR for 6 months and 2 full-time team members. |
| Managed connection pooling | Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers | Supported |
| 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. | 100 pooled connections on Starter and 10 direct; 10 pooled on Free, 500 on Pro and 1,000 on Business. |
| 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. | Daily backups with 7-day retention on Starter and Pro, 30 days on Business. The free plan has none. |

## 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))
- Prisma Postgres: $10/month for Starter. Pro is $49 and Business $129, each including a larger request allowance. ([source](https://www.prisma.io/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))
- Prisma Postgres: A plan fee plus usage: requests, memory GB-hours, active vCPU-hours and outbound bandwidth are each metered — $1 per million requests beyond the allowance, $0.006 per GB-hour, $0.064 per vCPU-hour, $0.025 per GB out. ([source](https://www.prisma.io/pricing))

### Startup credit program

- Aiven: 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/startups))
- Prisma Postgres: Prisma for Startups: database bill covered up to $10,000 for one year, plus 1:1 guidance. Venture-funded track requires pre-seed/seed/Series-A funding raised in the last 12 months and founded in the last 5 years; bootstrapped track requires ≥5k MRR for 6 months and 2 full-time team members. ([source](https://www.prisma.io/startups))

### 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))
- Prisma Postgres: PostgreSQL. ([source](https://www.prisma.io/pricing))

### 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))
- Prisma Postgres: 100 pooled connections on Starter and 10 direct; 10 pooled on Free, 500 on Pro and 1,000 on Business. ([source](https://www.prisma.io/pricing))

### 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))
- Prisma Postgres: Daily backups with 7-day retention on Starter and Pro, 30 days on Business. The free plan has none. ([source](https://www.prisma.io/pricing))

## 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 Prisma Postgres if Prisma ORM users who want the database and the client from one vendor, with a pooled connection limit stated per plan rather than left to be discovered.

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: Prisma Postgres — Four separate meters — requests, memory, vCPU and bandwidth — sit on top of the plan fee, so the monthly number is a floor rather than a bill.

## Documented by only one

- Storage (entry plan): Prisma Postgres: 500 MB on the free plan across 50 databases. Paid plans raise the database count to 1,000 and beyond.
- 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.
- When idle: Prisma Postgres: Scales to zero when idle, and Prisma states an idle app costs nothing.
- Database branching: Aiven: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write
- 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.
- Read replicas: Aiven: Supported

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Aiven or Prisma Postgres?**

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.
Prisma Postgres: $10/month for Starter. Pro is $49 and Business $129, each including a larger request allowance.

**Should I choose Aiven or Prisma Postgres?**

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 Prisma Postgres if Prisma ORM users who want the database and the client from one vendor, with a pooled connection limit stated per plan rather than left to be discovered.