# Crunchy Bridge vs Nile

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/crunchy-bridge-vs-nile/

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

## At a glance

| Criterion | Crunchy Bridge | Nile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Entry paid plan | $9 a month for Hobby-0 — 2 cores, 512 MB, AWS only. Crunchy says the Hobby tier runs on lower-quality infrastructure, has no PgBouncer and is not intended for production; the first production tier is Standard-4 at $70 a month for 1 core and 4 GB. There is no free plan. | $15/month for Pro, which carries a production SLA. Scale is $350/month. |
| Pricing model | Billed for the time a cluster is provisioned, prorated to the second, with the monthly figures on the plans page being what a full month costs. Price varies by instance size, region and storage. Three tiers — Hobby, Standard and Memory-optimized — where the tier decides IOPS, whether PgBouncer is included and what support you get, not just the size. | Priced on queries rather than instances, with a $15 base for Pro. Nile's own framing is "Pay for queries, not for instances", and additional tokens are $0.05 per million. |
| Managed connection pooling | Supported | Supported |
| Engine | PostgreSQL only. Crunchy Bridge is a single-engine service — there is no MySQL or analytics product beside it in the same offering — and it runs on all three major clouds so the database can sit next to whatever else you already run. | PostgreSQL, with tenant isolation as a first-class concept — databases, tenant databases and vector embeddings are all described as unlimited. |

## Where they differ

### Entry paid plan

- Crunchy Bridge: $9 a month for Hobby-0 — 2 cores, 512 MB, AWS only. Crunchy says the Hobby tier runs on lower-quality infrastructure, has no PgBouncer and is not intended for production; the first production tier is Standard-4 at $70 a month for 1 core and 4 GB. There is no free plan. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/plans-pricing))
- Nile: $15/month for Pro, which carries a production SLA. Scale is $350/month. ([source](https://www.thenile.dev/pricing))

### Pricing model

- Crunchy Bridge: Billed for the time a cluster is provisioned, prorated to the second, with the monthly figures on the plans page being what a full month costs. Price varies by instance size, region and storage. Three tiers — Hobby, Standard and Memory-optimized — where the tier decides IOPS, whether PgBouncer is included and what support you get, not just the size. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/concepts/plans-pricing))
- Nile: Priced on queries rather than instances, with a $15 base for Pro. Nile's own framing is "Pay for queries, not for instances", and additional tokens are $0.05 per million. ([source](https://www.thenile.dev/pricing))

### Engine

- Crunchy Bridge: PostgreSQL only. Crunchy Bridge is a single-engine service — there is no MySQL or analytics product beside it in the same offering — and it runs on all three major clouds so the database can sit next to whatever else you already run. ([source](https://docs.crunchybridge.com/))
- Nile: PostgreSQL, with tenant isolation as a first-class concept — databases, tenant databases and vector embeddings are all described as unlimited. ([source](https://www.thenile.dev/pricing))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Crunchy Bridge if Anyone who wants Postgres and nothing else, from people who work on Postgres. Ten days of per-minute recovery is included in the price of every cluster rather than sold as a tier, and replicas can sit in another region or another cloud.

Pick Nile if Multi-tenant SaaS where every customer wants isolation — Nile makes a database per tenant the default shape rather than something you build on top of Postgres.

Consider something else: Crunchy Bridge — You need a free plan to start on, or a second database engine later. This is a single-engine paid service.

Consider something else: Nile — Several of the features on its own pricing table are marked Coming soon, including branching, backups and provisioned compute, so what is bought today is narrower than the table suggests.

## Documented by only one

- Storage (entry plan): Nile: 5 GB on Pro, then $1.00 per additional GB.
- Regions: Crunchy Bridge: 37 regions across three clouds — 16 on AWS, 14 on Google Cloud, 7 on Azure — counted from the region tables on Crunchy's own plans page, which lists them and publishes no total.
- Connection limit: Nile: 10,000 connections on Pro, with connection pooling included.
- When idle: Nile: No cold start on Pro — Nile lists it as a plan feature rather than a behaviour to configure.
- Database branching: Crunchy Bridge: Limited — a new cluster restored from backup, to any minute in 10 days
- Point-in-time recovery: Crunchy Bridge: Any minute inside the 10 days of retained backups. The WAL is streamed every 60 seconds or 16 MB, whichever comes first, and a restore produces a fork of the cluster rather than replacing it.
- Read replicas: Crunchy Bridge: Supported
- Backup retention: Crunchy Bridge: 10 days, included in the cluster price rather than sold as a tier, and extendable by configuring additional daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups to keep.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Crunchy Bridge or Nile?**

Crunchy Bridge: $9 a month for Hobby-0 — 2 cores, 512 MB, AWS only. Crunchy says the Hobby tier runs on lower-quality infrastructure, has no PgBouncer and is not intended for production; the first production tier is Standard-4 at $70 a month for 1 core and 4 GB. There is no free plan.
Nile: $15/month for Pro, which carries a production SLA. Scale is $350/month.

**Should I choose Crunchy Bridge or Nile?**

Pick Crunchy Bridge if Anyone who wants Postgres and nothing else, from people who work on Postgres. Ten days of per-minute recovery is included in the price of every cluster rather than sold as a tier, and replicas can sit in another region or another cloud.
Pick Nile if Multi-tenant SaaS where every customer wants isolation — Nile makes a database per tenant the default shape rather than something you build on top of Postgres.