Crunchy Bridge vs Nile
SEPT 2026 auditA comparison of Crunchy Bridge and Nile built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.
The short answer
Choose 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.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Choose 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.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Consider something else if…
- Crunchy Bridge: You need a free plan to start on, or a second database engine later. This is a single-engine paid service.
- 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.
3 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.
Crunchy Bridge 0
Nile 0
At a glance.
| Criterion | Crunchy Bridge | Nile |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| 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. |
| Execution | ||
| Managed connection pooling | Supported | Supported |
| Data | ||
| 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.
- Nile
- $15/month for Pro, which carries a production SLA. Scale is $350/month.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Plans and pricing — Crunchy Bridge Documentation ↗
“In general, Hobby tier runs on lower quality underlying infrastructure, does not include PgBouncer, and is not intended for production usage. [...] Hobby-0* 2 512MB 5% 11,800 PG15-18 only ❌ ⚠️ Best effort $9.00 [...] Standard-4* 1 4GB 20,000 PG14-18 ✅ ✅ $70.00 [...] *Available on AWS only.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Pricing — Nile ↗
“Pro For launching production workloads. With production SLA $ 15 / month [...] Scale For scale, more security and global presence $ 350 / month”
Read 2026-09-06 · official 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.
- 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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Plans and pricing — Crunchy Bridge Documentation ↗
“Clusters are billed according to the amount of time they're provisioned in a given month, prorated to the second. While prices on this page are quoted for the cost of an entire month, you will only be billed that amount if your cluster is provisioned for the entire month. Pricing varies based on: Instance size Region Storage [...] Crunchy Bridge offers three tiers of databases -- Hobby, Standard, and Memory -- to cover a variety of use cases.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Pricing — Nile ↗
“Pay for queries Not for instances [...] 0.05 per million additional tokens Storage 5 GB $1.00 per additional GB”
Read 2026-09-06 · official 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.
- Nile
- PostgreSQL, with tenant isolation as a first-class concept — databases, tenant databases and vector embeddings are all described as unlimited.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Crunchy Bridge — Crunchy Bridge Documentation ↗
“Crunchy Bridge is a fully managed Postgres service from Crunchy Data. It takes care of running and managing Postgres so that you can stay focused on building your applications, not on keeping your database up and running. Bridge provides highly available Postgres across every major cloud provider — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure — so regardless of where you're running, you can closely colocate your database.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Pricing — Nile ↗
“multi-tenant applications with Nile's Postgres Unlimited Databases Unlimited Tenants Pay for queries Not for instances Limitless vector embeddings”
Read 2026-09-06 · official site
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: 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.