Aiven vs Prisma Postgres
SEPT 2026 auditA comparison of Aiven and Prisma Postgres 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 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.
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.
- 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.
6 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
Prisma Postgres 0
At a glance.
| Criterion | Aiven | Prisma Postgres |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| 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. |
| Execution | ||
| Managed connection pooling | Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers | Supported |
| 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. | 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.
- Prisma Postgres
- $10/month for Starter. Pro is $49 and Business $129, each including a larger request allowance.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- 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
- Pricing — Prisma ↗
“Starter $10 / month Prisma Compute 5M requests / month, then $1 per million [...] Pro $49 / month [...] Business $129 / month”
Read 2026-09-06 · official 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.
- 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.
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
- Pricing — Prisma ↗
“5M requests / month, then $1 per million $0.006 per GB-hour memory $0.064 per active vCPU-hours $0.025 per GB outbound bandwidth”
Read 2026-09-06 · official 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.
- 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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Aiven for Startups ↗
“Your startup should have been founded no more than 7 years ago. Your company should have raised external funding anything from pre-seed to Series B. From $12,000 up to $100,000 in Aiven credits to power your data infrastructure over the course of 12 months.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official site
- Prisma for Startups ↗
“Get exclusive 1:1 guidance from Prisma’s database experts, and have your database bill covered for a year, up to $10,000. [...] Raised venture funding in the last 12 months. Founded in the last 5 years.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official site
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.
- Prisma Postgres
- PostgreSQL.
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
- Pricing — Prisma ↗
“Prisma Postgres [...] Managed connection pool Connection limit (pooled)”
Read 2026-09-06 · official site
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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Connection limits per plan for Aiven for PostgreSQL® — Aiven docs ↗
“Default values of the max_connections setting vary according to the service plan: Plan Max connections Developer 15 Free 20 Hobbyist 25 Startup/Business/Premium-4 100 Startup/Business/Premium-8 200 Startup/Business/Premium-16 400 Startup/Business/Premium-32 800 Startup/Business/Premium-64 and above 1000 note Aiven can utilize any number of the connections for managing the service. Aiven for PostgreSQL doesn't apply a fixed per-GiB connection formula”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Pricing — Prisma ↗
“Managed connection pool Connection limit (pooled) Free 10 Starter 100 Pro 500 Business 1,000 Connection limit (direct) Free 10 Starter 10 Pro 50 Business 100”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
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.
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
- Pricing — Prisma ↗
“Backups Free — Starter Daily, 7-day retention Pro Daily, 7-day retention Business Daily, 30-day retention”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
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.
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.