# ScaleGrid vs Aiven

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/scalegrid-vs-aiven/

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

## At a glance

| Criterion | ScaleGrid | Aiven |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | No | Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off |
| Pricing model | 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. | Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. |
| Startup credit program | Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months. | Aiven for Startups: $12,000–$100,000 in Aiven credits over 12 months. Requires founded ≤7 years ago and external funding from pre-seed to Series B. |
| Regions | Six cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud (OCI) and Akamai. Specific regional availability is not published on the pricing or product pages. | 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. |
| Engine | MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server. | PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. |
| Backup retention | Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans. | By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. |

## Where they differ

### Free tier

- ScaleGrid: No ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))
- Aiven: Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/concepts/free-plan))

### Pricing model

- 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. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))
- Aiven: Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing))

### Startup credit program

- ScaleGrid: Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))
- Aiven: Aiven for Startups: $12,000–$100,000 in Aiven credits over 12 months. Requires founded ≤7 years ago and external funding from pre-seed to Series B. ([source](https://aiven.io/startups))

### Regions

- ScaleGrid: Six cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud (OCI) and Akamai. Specific regional availability is not published on the pricing or product pages. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/mysql.html))
- Aiven: 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/reference/list_of_clouds))

### Engine

- ScaleGrid: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))
- Aiven: PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql))

### Backup retention

- ScaleGrid: Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans. ([source](https://scalegrid.io/pricing.html))
- Aiven: By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups))

## Which should you choose?

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.

Pick Aiven if Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.

Consider something else: 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.

Consider something else: Aiven — You want long recovery history on a cheap plan. Backup history is what the plan tiers buy here: two days on the entry paid plan against thirty at the top.

## Documented by only one

- Entry paid plan: Aiven: $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12.
- Managed connection pooling: Aiven: Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers
- Connection limit: Aiven: Set per plan, not by a formula: 100 on the entry paid plan (Startup-4), rising to 200, 400, 800 and 1000 as the plan grows, with 25 on Hobbyist, 20 on Free and 15 on Developer. Aiven states plainly that it does not apply a per-GiB formula, and that some of the allowance is used by Aiven itself to manage the service.
- Database branching: Aiven: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write
- Point-in-time recovery: Aiven: Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first.
- Read replicas: Aiven: Supported

## Questions this comparison answers

**Free tier: ScaleGrid or Aiven?**

ScaleGrid: No
Aiven: Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off

**Should I choose ScaleGrid or Aiven?**

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.
Pick Aiven if Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.