Crunchy Bridge vs PlanetScale
SEPT 2026 auditA comparison of Crunchy Bridge and PlanetScale 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 PlanetScale if…
Production workloads that want replicas across availability zones as the default shape rather than an upgrade, and teams who need MySQL-compatible sharding that the Postgres-only services do not offer.
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.
- PlanetScale: You are prototyping. Pricing starts at a node rather than at zero, and there is no free tier documented on the pricing page.
7 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
PlanetScale 0
At a glance.
| Criterion | Crunchy Bridge | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | $5/month for a single-node Postgres database on network-attached storage; PlanetScale Metal with local NVMe starts at $50/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 by node size and storage rather than usage, with high-availability clusters sold as a primary plus two replicas |
| Execution | ||
| Managed connection pooling | Supported | Supported |
| Infrastructure | ||
| Regions | 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. | 19 regions — 12 on AWS (Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Montreal, Frankfurt, Dublin, London, São Paulo, N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon) and 7 on GCP. A branch's region is fixed at creation and changing it means migrating. |
| 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, and MySQL-compatible Vitess clusters with horizontal sharding |
| Database branching | Limited — a new cluster restored from backup, to any minute in 10 days | Supported |
| Point-in-time recovery | 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. | Point-in-time recovery through write-ahead log archiving. WAL is kept for as long as the oldest backup, so the default schedule gives a 2-day window and a longer retention extends it. |
| Read replicas | Supported | Supported |
| Backup retention | 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. | Automatic backups every 12 hours on production and development branches, retained 2 days by default. Custom schedules and manual backups can set a longer period, and are charged for it. |
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.
- PlanetScale
- $5/month for a single-node Postgres database on network-attached storage; PlanetScale Metal with local NVMe starts at $50/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 — PlanetScale ↗
“PlanetScale Postgres [...] Single node — Starting at $5/month for development and low-traffic workloads Metal — Starting at $50/month with local NVMe storage for high-performance needs High Availability — 1 primary + 2 replicas across 3 availability zones”
Read 2026-09-05 · 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.
- PlanetScale
- Priced by node size and storage rather than usage, with high-availability clusters sold as a primary plus two replicas
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 — PlanetScale ↗
“A primary and two included replica nodes ideal for high-availability workloads. 99.99% SLA.”
Read 2026-09-05 · official pricing
Regions
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.
19 regions — 12 on AWS (Tokyo, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Montreal, Frankfurt, Dublin, London, São Paulo, N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon) and 7 on GCP. A branch's region is fixed at creation and changing it means migrating.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Plans and pricing — Crunchy Bridge Documentation ↗
“Regions Amazon Web Services (AWS) Name Provider ID Asia Pacific (Tokyo) ap-northeast-1 Asia Pacific (Mumbai) ap-south-1 [...] US West (Oregon) us-west-2 Azure Name Provider ID Australia East (NSW) australiaeast [...] Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Name Provider ID Asia Northeast 1 (Tokyo) asia-northeast1”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Selecting a region — PlanetScale Docs ↗
“Currently, the following regions are supported, with their respective PlanetScale slugs: AWS ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo) [...] AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) [...] GCP us-central1 (Council Bluffs, Iowa) [...] GCP europe-west4 (Eemshaven, Netherlands) [...] Once you select a region for your default branch, it cannot be changed directly, but you can migrate to a new region if needed.”
Read 2026-09-05 · official docs
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.
- PlanetScale
- PostgreSQL, and MySQL-compatible Vitess clusters with horizontal sharding
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 — PlanetScale ↗
“MySQL-compatible with horizontal sharding for massive scale. Runs on network-attached storage or PlanetScale Metal.”
Read 2026-09-05 · official site
Database branching
- Crunchy Bridge
- Limited — a new cluster restored from backup, to any minute in 10 days
- PlanetScale
- Supported
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Backups — Crunchy Bridge Documentation ↗
“The automated daily backups are stored along with the associated WAL and can be used to create a point-in-time recovery fork of your cluster. [...] Forking from backup You can create a new fork from any of the backups stored for your cluster by clicking the "Fork from Backup" button. This process will create a new cluster according to the options you specify, and the new cluster will be populated with the data from the backup. Info Remember, each fork will have its own unique connection string.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Branching — PlanetScale Docs ↗
“PlanetScale Postgres provides two types of database branches: Development branches — Development branches run on PS-DEV instances that have limited performance capabilities, different egress rates, and no replicas. [...] Production branches — Production branches are intended for production traffic and include optional replicas for high availability.”
Read 2026-09-05 · official docs
Point-in-time recovery
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.
Point-in-time recovery through write-ahead log archiving. WAL is kept for as long as the oldest backup, so the default schedule gives a 2-day window and a longer retention extends it.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Backups — Crunchy Bridge Documentation ↗
“kept current by streaming the WAL every 60 seconds or 16MB (whichever comes first). 10 days of these backups will be retained by the platform automatically. These backups can be used to restore a fork of your cluster to any minute in its history.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Back up and restore — PlanetScale Docs ↗
“PlanetScale Postgres databases include comprehensive backup and restore capabilities to protect your data. The backup system provides both automated scheduled backups and manual on-demand backups, as well as point-in-time recovery (PITR) support through Write-Ahead Log (WAL) archiving. [...] WAL logs are retained for the same period as your oldest backup.”
Read 2026-09-05 · official docs
Backup retention
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.
Automatic backups every 12 hours on production and development branches, retained 2 days by default. Custom schedules and manual backups can set a longer period, and are charged for it.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- Backups — Crunchy Bridge Documentation ↗
“10 days of these backups will be retained by the platform automatically. [...] By default, Crunchy Bridge automatically captures and retains the most recent 10 days' worth of backups for each cluster. That is included in the price of each cluster.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
- Back up and restore — PlanetScale Docs ↗
“All PlanetScale Postgres databases include automatic scheduled backups that run every 12 hours for production and development branches. Default backups are created automatically and don't require any setup. There are no additional charges for these backups. [...] The default, included backup schedule retains backups for 2 days. You can set a custom retention period for custom backup schedules and manual one-off backups.”
Read 2026-09-05 · official docs
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 PlanetScale?
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.
PlanetScale: $5/month for a single-node Postgres database on network-attached storage; PlanetScale Metal with local NVMe starts at $50/month
Should I choose Crunchy Bridge or PlanetScale?
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 PlanetScale if Production workloads that want replicas across availability zones as the default shape rather than an upgrade, and teams who need MySQL-compatible sharding that the Postgres-only services do not offer.