ScaleGrid vs Aiven
A comparison of ScaleGrid and Aiven built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.
The short answer
- 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.
6 sourced criteria separate them:
- Free tier
- ScaleGrid: No
- Aiven: Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
- 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.
- 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.
- Startup credit program
- ScaleGrid: Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Engine
- ScaleGrid: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server.
- 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.
- Backup retention
- ScaleGrid: Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.
- 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.
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.
ScaleGrid 0
Aiven 0
At a glance.
| Criterion | ScaleGrid | Aiven |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| 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. |
| Infrastructure | ||
| 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. |
| Data | ||
| 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
- Aiven
- Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- ScaleGrid Pricing ↗
“Experience ScaleGrid for 7 days, no credit card required. [A time-limited trial, not an ongoing free plan.]”
Read 2026-09-11 · official pricing
- Free plans — Aiven docs ↗
“You don't need a credit card to create a free service and you can use them indefinitely free of charge. Free services do not have any time limitations. However, Aiven reserves the right to: Power off free services with no initial usage within the first few hours after the service is running. [...] Power off free services with no continuative activity on the service.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
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.
- 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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- ScaleGrid Pricing ↗
“Dedicated Hosting: All-inclusive plans covering machine, disk, and network costs. Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): Management-only pricing; you pay cloud provider separately.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official pricing
- Plans & Pricing — Aiven ↗
“Aiven's pricing is all-inclusive and transparent, providing you with the confidence [...] Startup starting from $75 / month $0.10 / hour [...] Business starting from $180 / month $0.25 / hour [...] Everything in Startup, plus high availability Premium starting from $270 / month $0.37 / hour”
Read 2026-09-09 · official pricing
Startup credit program
- ScaleGrid
- Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months.
- 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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- ScaleGrid Pricing ↗
“Startup Saver provides up to 50% discount over 12 months.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official pricing
- Aiven for Startups ↗
“Your startup should have been founded no more than 7 years ago. Your company should have raised external funding anything from pre-seed to Series B. From $12,000 up to $100,000 in Aiven credits to power your data infrastructure over the course of 12 months.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official site
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.
- 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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- ScaleGrid MySQL Hosting ↗
“AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud (OCI), Akamai.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official site
- Available cloud regions — Aiven docs ↗
“This is a reference list of the default cloud regions available per provider on the Aiven Platform. note The list of available clouds can differ per project. Not all Aiven service types are available for all cloud providers and regions.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
Engine
- ScaleGrid
- MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ and SQL Server.
- 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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- ScaleGrid Pricing ↗
“MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, SQL Server.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official pricing
- Aiven for PostgreSQL® — Aiven docs ↗
“Aiven for PostgreSQL is the perfect fit for your relational data. A scalable SQL database solution that can be up and running within a few minutes. [...] Find a comprehensive per-release documentation on the PostgreSQL project website.”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
Backup retention
- ScaleGrid
- Up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.
- 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.
Sources (2) →Sources ↓
- ScaleGrid Pricing ↗
“ScaleGrid offers up to five backups per deployment on ScaleGrid's dedicated hosting plans.”
Read 2026-09-11 · official pricing
- Aiven for PostgreSQL® backups — Aiven docs ↗
“Backup retention time by plan The number of stored backups and the backup retention time depends on the service plan that you have selected. Plan Type Backup Retention Time Hobbyist None Startup 2 days Business 14 days Premium 30 days”
Read 2026-09-09 · official docs
When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.
Which should you choose?
Choose 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.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Choose 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.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
Consider something else if…
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.