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Amazon RDS vs ScaleGrid

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Amazon RDS and ScaleGrid 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 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

Choose ScaleGrid if…

Teams that already have a favored database engine and cloud provider but want someone else operating it — the BYOC model bills infrastructure at cost and adds management on top, worth it if the operational burden is the actual problem.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • 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.
  • ScaleGrid: The workload fits a single-engine specialist with its own scale-to-zero or branching model — ScaleGrid's value is operating an engine you already chose, not offering a distinctive one.

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

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

Visit Amazon RDS documentationVisit ScaleGrid 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.

CriterionAmazon RDSScaleGrid
Pricing
Free tierNo — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.No
Kind of free offerIntroductory free tierFree trial
When the free offer ends
6 months from account creation.
7 days.
Entry paid plan$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.Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).
Pricing modelOn-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.Two models: Dedicated Hosting, an all-inclusive plan covering machine, disk and network cost; or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), management-only pricing where the cloud provider is billed separately.
Limits
Storage (entry plan)Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).18 GB storage on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 1 GB RAM); IOPS listed as N/A. Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Memory (entry plan)
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.
1 GB RAM on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 18 GB storage). Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Execution
Managed connection poolingSupportedSupported — PgBouncer for PostgreSQL, enabled at cluster creation or later, with pooling mode and pool size set by you.
Infrastructure
Regions39 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.AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean are named as examples, not as a list; the site footer names Oracle and Zadara instead of Akamai. No region list is published.
Data
EnginePostgreSQL, 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.MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server.
Connection limitNot 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.No platform cap published: max_connections (maximum permitted simultaneous client connections) is listed as a customer-editable MySQL server parameter in the ScaleGrid console.
When idleA 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.Manual pause/resume on Bring Your Own Cloud clusters: a paused cluster's nodes are stopped and its cloud VM costs stop, but ScaleGrid management costs continue and the data is unreachable until resumed. Only standard clusters using persistent storage; high-performance local-SSD clusters cannot be paused.
Point-in-time recoveryAny 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.PostgreSQL PITR: backups every 10 minutes by default, transaction logs retained 7 days; supported on Azure, DigitalOcean, EC2 and OCI only.
Read replicasSupported — 15 per primary, raisable on requestSupported — Converting a standalone deployment to a replica set: 2 + 1 quorum or 3 nodes, in datacenter regions you pick.
Backup retentionBetween 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.Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.
Rewind in placeNot supported — Point-in-time restore creates a new DB instance without modifying the source; no in-place rewind.Not supported — PITR restores via Peek at Backup or Clone into a brand new cluster; the source deployment is not rewound.
Compliance
SOC 2Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.SOC 2 Type II audited against the Security trust service criterion by Insight Assurance; report available on request through the Trust Center form.
HIPAA
Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.
HIPAA compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; the SOC 2 trust page does not mention HIPAA.
GDPR / data residency
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.
GDPR DPA published with EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two) for EEA transfers; ScaleGrid itself is located in the United States.
PCI DSS
Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
PCI compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; no PCI DSS attestation or level is published.
Encryption at restAES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.Optional encryption at rest for data and backups; when enabled, backups are encrypted and can only be mounted on the database machines.
Customer-managed keysAn 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.Bring Your Own Encryption Key lets customers control the OS encryption key used for their deployments, announced in the March 2026 platform updates. Listed under Other Relevant Updates in the platform's March 2026 product-update summary.
Role-based access controlAWS IAM identity-based policies, roles and managed policies control access to RDS resources; IAM database authentication is available for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.Role-Based Access Control in the ScaleGrid console: roles and permissions can be assigned to the users on a team account.
Private networking / VPC
DB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.
Bring Your Own Cloud plans can use VPCs (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, OCI VCN, Azure VNET) and Security Groups; Dedicated Hosting plans cannot.
Dedicated infrastructure
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.
Dedicated Hosting plans run on dedicated virtual machines hosted by ScaleGrid, exclusive to a single client or business.

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.

Kind of free offer

Amazon RDS
Introductory free tier
ScaleGrid
Free trial
Sources (2) →
  • 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

  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Dive in for free Explore free for a full week-no credit card, no hassle.”

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

When the free offer ends

Amazon RDS

6 months from account creation.

ScaleGrid

7 days.

Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

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.
ScaleGrid
Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).
Sources (2) →

Pricing model

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.
ScaleGrid
Two models: Dedicated Hosting, an all-inclusive plan covering machine, disk and network cost; or Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), management-only pricing where the cloud provider is billed separately.
Sources (2) →
  • 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

  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Our Dedicated Hosting plans are all-inclusive and cover machine cost, as well as your disk and network costs and up to 5 free backups. The Bring Your Own Cloud plans are management-only and connect to your existing cloud account so you pay for those costs with your cloud provider.”

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

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).
ScaleGrid
18 GB storage on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 1 GB RAM); IOPS listed as N/A. Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Sources (2) →

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.

ScaleGrid

1 GB RAM on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 18 GB storage). Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.

Sources (2) →

Regions

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.
ScaleGrid
AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean are named as examples, not as a list; the site footer names Oracle and Zadara instead of Akamai. No region list is published.
Sources (2) →

Engine

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.
ScaleGrid
MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server.
Sources (2) →

Connection limit

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.
ScaleGrid
No platform cap published: max_connections (maximum permitted simultaneous client connections) is listed as a customer-editable MySQL server parameter in the ScaleGrid console.
Sources (2) →

When idle

Amazon 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.
ScaleGrid
Manual pause/resume on Bring Your Own Cloud clusters: a paused cluster's nodes are stopped and its cloud VM costs stop, but ScaleGrid management costs continue and the data is unreachable until resumed. Only standard clusters using persistent storage; high-performance local-SSD clusters cannot be paused.
Sources (2) →
  • Stopping an Amazon RDS DB instance temporarily - Amazon RDS User Guide ↗

    “You can stop your DB instance intermittently for temporary testing or for a daily development activity, for a maximum of 7 consecutive days. [...] While the instance is stopped, you're not charged for DB instance hours. [...] If you don't manually start your DB instance after it is stopped for seven consecutive days, RDS automatically starts your DB instance for you.”

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

  • New Feature for BYOC - Pausing and Resuming Clusters ↗

    “you will be able to pause a running cluster, putting it in a “Paused” state. The “Paused” state means that all cluster nodes are in a stopped state. While a cluster is “Paused” you will no longer get charged for your cloud provider’s VM costs [...] you will still get charged for the ScaleGrid management cost [...] This feature is only available on standard clusters using persistent storage”

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

Point-in-time recovery

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.
ScaleGrid
PostgreSQL PITR: backups every 10 minutes by default, transaction logs retained 7 days; supported on Azure, DigitalOcean, EC2 and OCI only.
Sources (2) →

Backup retention

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.
ScaleGrid
Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.
Sources (2) →
  • 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

  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “ScaleGrid offers up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.”

    Read 2026-09-11 · official pricing · Report a correction

SOC 2

Amazon RDS
Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
ScaleGrid
SOC 2 Type II audited against the Security trust service criterion by Insight Assurance; report available on request through the Trust Center form.
Sources (2) →
  • AWS Services in Scope — SOC ↗

    “This webpage provides a list of AWS Services in Scope of AWS assurance programs. [...] Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) ✓ Amazon Route 53 ✓ Amazon S3 Glacier ✓ Amazon”

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

  • ScaleGrid SOC 2 Type II Audited Controls ↗

    “ScaleGrid’s SOC 2 Type II audit focused on the Security trust service criterion and evaluated the effectiveness of our Security controls and operational practices over time. The audit was conducted by independent audit firm Insight Assurance. [...] Customers and prospective customers may request access to ScaleGrid’s SOC 2 Type II report and supporting security documentation through the request form on this page.”

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

HIPAA

Amazon RDS
Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.
ScaleGrid
HIPAA compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; the SOC 2 trust page does not mention HIPAA.
Sources (2) →

GDPR / data residency

Amazon 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.
ScaleGrid
GDPR DPA published with EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two) for EEA transfers; ScaleGrid itself is located in the United States.
Sources (2) →
  • GDPR — Amazon Web Services ↗

    “AWS customers can use all AWS services to process personal data [...] in compliance with the GDPR. [...] Customers have control of their customer data. With AWS, customers can: Determine where their customer data will be stored, including the type of storage and geographic region of that storage.”

    Read 2026-09-12 · official site · Report a correction

  • Data Processing Addendum (DPA) | ScaleGrid ↗

    “ScaleGrid is located in the United States and to the extent any processing of Personal Data of Data Subjects located in the EEA by ScaleGrid takes place in any country outside the EEA (other than exclusively in an Adequate Country), there must be a lawful basis for this transfer as required by the Data Protection Legislation.”

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

PCI DSS

Amazon RDS
Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
ScaleGrid
PCI compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; no PCI DSS attestation or level is published.
Sources (2) →

Encryption at rest

Amazon RDS
AES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.
ScaleGrid
Optional encryption at rest for data and backups; when enabled, backups are encrypted and can only be mounted on the database machines.
Sources (2) →

Customer-managed keys

Amazon 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.
ScaleGrid
Bring Your Own Encryption Key lets customers control the OS encryption key used for their deployments, announced in the March 2026 platform updates. Listed under Other Relevant Updates in the platform's March 2026 product-update summary.
Sources (2) →

Role-based access control

Amazon 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.
ScaleGrid
Role-Based Access Control in the ScaleGrid console: roles and permissions can be assigned to the users on a team account.
Sources (2) →

Private networking / VPC

Amazon RDS
DB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.
ScaleGrid
Bring Your Own Cloud plans can use VPCs (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, OCI VCN, Azure VNET) and Security Groups; Dedicated Hosting plans cannot.
Sources (2) →

Dedicated infrastructure

Amazon 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.
ScaleGrid
Dedicated Hosting plans run on dedicated virtual machines hosted by ScaleGrid, exclusive to a single client or business.
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.

What the free plan includesScaleGrid: A full week of access with no credit card. There is no ongoing free plan.
Credit card to startScaleGrid: No
Startup credit programScaleGrid: Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months. — A discount on the invoice, not a credit balance.
Uptime SLAAmazon 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.
Database branchingScaleGrid: Limited — Clone copies a backup's config and contents into a new, separately billed cluster, not an in-place branch.
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.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Amazon RDS or ScaleGrid?

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.

ScaleGrid: Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).

Storage (entry plan): Amazon RDS or ScaleGrid?

Amazon RDS: Minimum 20 GiB of General Purpose SSD storage per DB instance, selectable up to 64 TiB (RDS for MySQL, gp2 or gp3).

ScaleGrid: 18 GB storage on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 1 GB RAM); IOPS listed as N/A. Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.

Should I choose Amazon RDS or ScaleGrid?

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.

Pick ScaleGrid if Teams that already have a favored database engine and cloud provider but want someone else operating it — the BYOC model bills infrastructure at cost and adds management on top, worth it if the operational burden is the actual problem.

Provider pages

Amazon RDSAWS managed relational database service running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2 on provisioned DB instances.ScaleGridManaged hosting for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and more, across six cloud providers via dedicated or bring-your-own-cloud plans.

Related comparisons

Aiven vs Amazon RDSAmazon Aurora vs ScaleGridAmazon RDS vs Amazon AuroraAmazon RDS vs NileAmazon RDS vs PlanetScaleAmazon RDS vs Prisma PostgresAmazon RDS vs TigerDataNeon vs ScaleGrid

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.