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Amazon RDS vs TigerData

SEPT 2026 audit

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

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 32 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 TigerData if…

Time-series and analytics workloads that want to stay in Postgres — TimescaleDB's compression is the reason the storage line is affordable at volume.

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.
  • TigerData: The advertised storage price assumes 5x compression, so a workload that does not compress that well pays materially more than the figure suggests.

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

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

Visit Amazon RDS documentationVisit TigerData 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 RDSTigerData
Pricing
Free tier
No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
Yes — Free services are in beta, us-east-1 only, and go read-only at the storage limit.
Kind of free offerIntroductory free tierFree tier
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.Compute starts at $30/month on Performance, billed hourly, with storage charged separately. Scale starts at $36/month.
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.Compute and storage are billed separately and hourly rather than as one plan price — compute from $30 a month, storage at $0.177 per GB-month, with the headline storage figure resting on an assumed 5x compression ratio.
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).Up to 16 TB per service on the Performance (entry) plan, billed on actual usage; 64 TB on Scale and Enterprise
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.Up to 32 GB per service on the Performance (entry) plan; 128 GB on Scale and 256 GB on Enterprise
Execution
Managed connection poolingSupportedSupported — pgBouncer pooler added per service in Console, in session or transaction mode.
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.13 AWS regions (US, Canada, Sao Paulo, Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Zurich, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo) and 4 Azure regions for Tiger Cloud services
Uptime SLA
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.
Enterprise SLAs, with no percentage published on the pricing page.
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.PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB, aimed at time-series, real-time analytics and events. A self-managed edition exists for on-prem and private cloud.
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.max_connections settable 25-500 on services from 0.5 CPU / 2 GiB to 4 CPU / 16 GiB, and 25-2000 from 8 CPU / 32 GiB up; fixed at 25 on shared CPU
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.Billed while running: all active standard services are charged even when not in use, and unused ones must be paused or deleted manually
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.3 days on Performance, with cross-region backups available for disaster recovery on higher tiers.
Read replicasSupported — 15 per primary, raisable on requestSupported
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.One full backup weekly plus daily incrementals, kept for the plan recovery period; Enterprise can set 14-180 days; cross-region copies always kept 14 days
Rewind in placeNot supported — Point-in-time restore creates a new DB instance without modifying the source; no in-place rewind.Not supported — Recovery is to a PITR fork you point the app at; the original service stays untouched.
Compliance
SOC 2Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.SOC 2 Type 2 compliant; the annual report is available to customers on the Scale or Enterprise pricing plans by support ticket.
HIPAAListed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. — SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Db2 and MariaDB engines only.The Tiger Cloud Enterprise plan is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. Enterprise plan only.
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.
Complies with EU GDPR; all customer data is processed under Tiger Data's GDPR-compliant Data Processor Addendum, which applies to all customers.
Encryption at restAES-256 encryption of the underlying storage, logs, automated backups, read replicas and snapshots for DB instances created as encrypted.Both active databases and backups are encrypted at rest (and in transit) with the industry-standard AES-256 algorithm.
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.Project-level role-based access with Owner, Admin, Developer and Viewer roles; database-level roles are managed separately per service.
Private networking / VPCDB instances launch into an Amazon VPC with customer-chosen IP ranges, subnets and access control lists, at no additional cost.VPC peering leaves no public internet access to the service; AWS PrivateLink private endpoints route traffic over the AWS network.
Dedicated infrastructureA 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.Managed Service for TimescaleDB (TimescaleDB hosted with Aiven): each service virtual machine is dedicated to a single customer, never multi-tenanted. Read on the MST security docs; scope is MST, not the Tiger Cloud platform.

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

Amazon RDS
No — Free usage is time-boxed (6 months on the Free plan, 12 months legacy), not an ongoing free plan.
TigerData
Yes — Free services are in beta, us-east-1 only, and go read-only at the storage limit.
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

  • About Tiger Cloud services | Tiger Data Docs ↗

    “You create free and standard services in Tiger Console. A standard service comes with the full range of features according to your pricing plan. A free service comes at zero cost and gives you limited features and resources. [...] Free services come with pre-configured CPU and memory, are hosted in us-east-1 region, and offer limited resources with a basic feature scope.”

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

Kind of free offer

Amazon RDS
Introductory free tier
TigerData
Free tier
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

  • About Tiger Cloud services | Tiger Data Docs ↗

    “You create free and standard services in Tiger Console. A standard service comes with the full range of features according to your pricing plan. A free service comes at zero cost and gives you limited features and resources. [...] Free services come with pre-configured CPU and memory, are hosted in us-east-1 region, and offer limited resources with a basic feature scope.”

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

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.
TigerData
Compute starts at $30/month on Performance, billed hourly, with storage charged separately. Scale starts at $36/month.
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.
TigerData
Compute and storage are billed separately and hourly rather than as one plan price — compute from $30 a month, storage at $0.177 per GB-month, with the headline storage figure resting on an assumed 5x compression ratio.
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

  • Pricing — TigerData ↗

    “Pay as you go hourly Compute starts at $30/month Storage priced at $0.177/GB-month [...] Effective storage price is based on 5x compression (average customer savings).”

    Read 2026-09-06 · 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).
TigerData
Up to 16 TB per service on the Performance (entry) plan, billed on actual usage; 64 TB on Scale and Enterprise
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.
TigerData
Up to 32 GB per service on the Performance (entry) plan; 128 GB on Scale and 256 GB on Enterprise
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.
TigerData
13 AWS regions (US, Canada, Sao Paulo, Ireland, London, Frankfurt, Zurich, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo) and 4 Azure regions for Tiger Cloud services
Sources (2) →

Uptime SLA

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.
TigerData
Enterprise SLAs, with no percentage published on the pricing page.
Sources (2) →
  • 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

  • Tiger Data Pricing ↗

    “mission-critical reliability and monitoring cross-region backups for disaster recovery enterprise SLAs production support (24x7, 1 hour response time for sev 1 issues)”

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

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.
TigerData
PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB, aimed at time-series, real-time analytics and events. A self-managed edition exists for on-prem and private cloud.
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.
TigerData
max_connections settable 25-500 on services from 0.5 CPU / 2 GiB to 4 CPU / 16 GiB, and 25-2000 from 8 CPU / 32 GiB up; fixed at 25 on shared CPU
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.
TigerData
Billed while running: all active standard services are charged even when not in use, and unused ones must be paused or deleted manually
Sources (2) →

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.
TigerData
3 days on Performance, with cross-region backups available for disaster recovery on higher tiers.
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.
TigerData
One full backup weekly plus daily incrementals, kept for the plan recovery period; Enterprise can set 14-180 days; cross-region copies always kept 14 days
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

  • Back up and recover services | Tiger Data Docs ↗

    “Tiger Cloud automatically creates one full backup every week, and incremental backups every day in the same region as your service. [...] on Enterprise you can set a retention period of up to 180 days for each service. [...] Cross-region backups are always kept for 14 days.”

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

SOC 2

Amazon RDS
Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
TigerData
SOC 2 Type 2 compliant; the annual report is available to customers on the Scale or Enterprise pricing plans by support ticket.
Sources (2) →

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.
TigerData
The Tiger Cloud Enterprise plan is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. Enterprise plan only.
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.
TigerData
Complies with EU GDPR; all customer data is processed under Tiger Data's GDPR-compliant Data Processor Addendum, which applies to all customers.
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

  • About security in Tiger Cloud | Tiger Data Docs ↗

    “Tiger Data complies with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [...] All customer data is processed in accordance with Tiger Data's GDPR-compliant”

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

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.
TigerData
Both active databases and backups are encrypted at rest (and in transit) with the industry-standard AES-256 algorithm.
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.
TigerData
Project-level role-based access with Owner, Admin, Developer and Viewer roles; database-level roles are managed separately per service.
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.
TigerData
VPC peering leaves no public internet access to the service; AWS PrivateLink private endpoints route traffic over the AWS network.
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.
TigerData
Managed Service for TimescaleDB (TimescaleDB hosted with Aiven): each service virtual machine is dedicated to a single customer, never multi-tenanted. Read on the MST security docs; scope is MST, not the Tiger Cloud platform.
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 startTigerData: No
When the free offer endsAmazon RDS: 6 months from account creation.
Database branchingTigerData: Supported — Service forks, created at current state, last snapshot, or a timestamp in the plan recovery window.
Storage priceTigerData: $0.177 per GB-month on Performance and $0.212 on Scale. TigerData notes the effective price assumes 5x compression, which is an average rather than a guarantee.
Support on entry paid planTigerData: Basic support, 9-5 ET, on the entry plan. Enterprise adds production support at 24x7.
Response time commitmentTigerData: 1 hour for Sev 1, on Enterprise only. The entry plan publishes opening hours, 9-5 ET, which is not a response commitment.
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.
PCI DSSAmazon RDS: Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
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.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: Amazon RDS or TigerData?

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.

TigerData: Compute starts at $30/month on Performance, billed hourly, with storage charged separately. Scale starts at $36/month.

Free tier: Amazon RDS or TigerData?

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

TigerData: Yes — Free services are in beta, us-east-1 only, and go read-only at the storage limit.

Storage (entry plan): Amazon RDS or TigerData?

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

TigerData: Up to 16 TB per service on the Performance (entry) plan, billed on actual usage; 64 TB on Scale and Enterprise

Should I choose Amazon RDS or TigerData?

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 TigerData if Time-series and analytics workloads that want to stay in Postgres — TimescaleDB's compression is the reason the storage line is affordable at volume.

Provider pages

Amazon RDSAWS managed relational database service running PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server and Db2 on provisioned DB instances.TigerDataManaged TimescaleDB — Postgres for time-series and real-time analytics — priced with compute and storage billed separately.

Related comparisons

Aiven vs Amazon RDSAiven vs TigerDataAmazon Aurora vs TigerDataAmazon RDS vs Amazon AuroraAmazon RDS vs NileAmazon RDS vs PlanetScaleAmazon RDS vs Prisma PostgresAmazon RDS vs ScaleGrid

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.