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ScaleGrid vs Aiven

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of ScaleGrid and Aiven built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 31 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

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.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: ScaleGrid alternatives · Aiven alternatives

15 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit ScaleGrid documentationVisit Aiven documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionScaleGridAiven
Pricing
Free tier
No
Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
Kind of free offerFree trialAlways free
Credit card to startNoNo
When the free offer ends7 days.Never — free services have no time limitations.
Entry paid plan
Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).
$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.
Pricing modelTwo 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 programStartup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months. — A discount on the invoice, not a credit balance.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.
Execution
Managed connection poolingSupported — PgBouncer for PostgreSQL, enabled at cluster creation or later, with pooling mode and pool size set by you.Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers
Infrastructure
RegionsAWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean are named as examples, not as a list; the site footer names Oracle and Zadara instead of Akamai. No region list is published.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
EngineMySQL, 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.
Connection limitNo platform cap published: max_connections (maximum permitted simultaneous client connections) is listed as a customer-editable MySQL server parameter in the ScaleGrid console.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 branchingLimited — Clone copies a backup's config and contents into a new, separately billed cluster, not an in-place branch.Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write
Point-in-time recoveryPostgreSQL PITR: backups every 10 minutes by default, transaction logs retained 7 days; supported on Azure, DigitalOcean, EC2 and OCI only.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 replicasSupported — Converting a standalone deployment to a replica set: 2 + 1 quorum or 3 nodes, in datacenter regions you pick.Supported
Backup retentionUp 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.
Compliance
SOC 2SOC 2 Type II audited against the Security trust service criterion by Insight Assurance; report available on request through the Trust Center form.We also provide ISAE 3000/SOC2 Type II reports.
HIPAA
HIPAA compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; the SOC 2 trust page does not mention HIPAA.
Our services are ISO 27000-series, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant.
Encryption at restOptional encryption at rest for data and backups; when enabled, backups are encrypted and can only be mounted on the database machines.All data is fully encrypted end-to-end at rest and in transit.
Private networking / VPC
Bring Your Own Cloud plans can use VPCs (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, OCI VCN, Azure VNET) and Security Groups; Dedicated Hosting plans cannot.
Deploy services directly into your own cloud account for data residency and VPC peering.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Free tier

ScaleGrid
No
Aiven
Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off
Sources (2) →
  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Dive in for free Explore free for a full week-no credit card, no hassle.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • 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 · Report a correction

Kind of free offer

ScaleGrid
Free trial
Aiven
Always free
Sources (2) →
  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Dive in for free Explore free for a full week-no credit card, no hassle.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • 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 · Report a correction

When the free offer ends

ScaleGrid
7 days.
Aiven
Never — free services have no time limitations.
Sources (2) →

Entry paid plan

ScaleGrid
Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).
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.
Sources (2) →

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) →
  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Our Dedicated Hosting plans are all-inclusive and cover machine cost, as well as your disk and network costs and up to 5 free backups. The Bring Your Own Cloud plans are management-only and connect to your existing cloud account so you pay for those costs with your cloud provider.”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • 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 · Report a correction

Startup credit program

ScaleGrid
Startup Saver: up to 50% discount on ScaleGrid hosting for 12 months. — A discount on the invoice, not a credit balance.
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) →
  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “Upto 50% Discount OVER 12 MONTHS Startup Saver Benefit from significant cost savings on our database management solutions, specifically tailored to support the dynamic needs of startups.”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • 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 · Report a correction

Regions

ScaleGrid
AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean are named as examples, not as a list; the site footer names Oracle and Zadara instead of Akamai. No region list is published.
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) →
  • ScaleGrid MySQL Hosting ↗

    “offering high availability, dedicated servers, and superuser control across major cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Akamai and DigitalOcean”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official site · Report a correction

  • 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 · Report a correction

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) →
  • ScaleGrid Pricing ↗

    “ScaleGrid for MySQL™ ScaleGrid for PostgreSQL® ScaleGrid for MongoDB® ScaleGrid for Redis® ScaleGrid for RabbitMQ ScaleGrid for SQL Server®”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • 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 · Report a correction

Connection limit

ScaleGrid
No platform cap published: max_connections (maximum permitted simultaneous client connections) is listed as a customer-editable MySQL server parameter in the ScaleGrid console.
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.
Sources (2) →

Point-in-time recovery

ScaleGrid
PostgreSQL PITR: backups every 10 minutes by default, transaction logs retained 7 days; supported on Azure, DigitalOcean, EC2 and OCI only.
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.
Sources (2) →

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) →

SOC 2

ScaleGrid
SOC 2 Type II audited against the Security trust service criterion by Insight Assurance; report available on request through the Trust Center form.
Aiven
We also provide ISAE 3000/SOC2 Type II reports.
Sources (2) →
  • ScaleGrid SOC 2 Type II Audited Controls ↗

    “ScaleGrid’s SOC 2 Type II audit focused on the Security trust service criterion and evaluated the effectiveness of our Security controls and operational practices over time. The audit was conducted by independent audit firm Insight Assurance. [...] Customers and prospective customers may request access to ScaleGrid’s SOC 2 Type II report and supporting security documentation through the request form on this page.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

  • Security, Privacy & Compliance | Aiven ↗

    “We also provide ISAE 3000/SOC2 Type II reports.”

    Read 2026-09-22 · official site · Report a correction

HIPAA

ScaleGrid
HIPAA compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; the SOC 2 trust page does not mention HIPAA.
Aiven
Our services are ISO 27000-series, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant.
Sources (2) →

Encryption at rest

ScaleGrid
Optional encryption at rest for data and backups; when enabled, backups are encrypted and can only be mounted on the database machines.
Aiven
All data is fully encrypted end-to-end at rest and in transit.
Sources (2) →

Private networking / VPC

ScaleGrid
Bring Your Own Cloud plans can use VPCs (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, OCI VCN, Azure VNET) and Security Groups; Dedicated Hosting plans cannot.
Aiven
Deploy services directly into your own cloud account for data residency and VPC peering.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

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03.

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 — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

What the free plan includesScaleGrid: A full week of access with no credit card. There is no ongoing free plan.
Storage (entry plan)ScaleGrid: 18 GB storage on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 1 GB RAM); IOPS listed as N/A. Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Memory (entry plan)ScaleGrid: 1 GB RAM on NANO, the entry row of the pricing calculator for PostgreSQL on DigitalOcean (1 core, 18 GB storage). Calculator table; renders client-side, so the excerpt needs the render-fetch path.
Uptime SLAAiven: 99.99% from Startup ($75/month), the entry paid plan, upward.
When idleScaleGrid: Manual pause/resume on Bring Your Own Cloud clusters: a paused cluster's nodes are stopped and its cloud VM costs stop, but ScaleGrid management costs continue and the data is unreachable until resumed. Only standard clusters using persistent storage; high-performance local-SSD clusters cannot be paused.
Rewind in placeScaleGrid: Not supported — PITR restores via Peek at Backup or Clone into a brand new cluster; the source deployment is not rewound.
Support on entry paid planAiven: Documentation on the free tier; email with best-effort same or next business day responses on paid plans. Faster responses and phone support are three further tiers, charged separately.
GDPR / data residencyScaleGrid: GDPR DPA published with EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two) for EEA transfers; ScaleGrid itself is located in the United States.Aiven: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Aiven.
PCI DSSScaleGrid: PCI compliance listed under Support for ScaleGrid Enterprise (on-premises / private cloud) deployments. Stated for the Enterprise plan only; no PCI DSS attestation or level is published.Aiven: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-22 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Aiven.
Customer-managed keysScaleGrid: Bring Your Own Encryption Key lets customers control the OS encryption key used for their deployments, announced in the March 2026 platform updates. Listed under Other Relevant Updates in the platform's March 2026 product-update summary.Aiven: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-22 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Aiven.
Role-based access controlScaleGrid: Role-Based Access Control in the ScaleGrid console: roles and permissions can be assigned to the users on a team account.
Dedicated infrastructureScaleGrid: Dedicated Hosting plans run on dedicated virtual machines hosted by ScaleGrid, exclusive to a single client or business.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Entry paid plan: ScaleGrid or Aiven?

ScaleGrid: Dedicated Hosting starts at $10/month for Redis; $13/month PostgreSQL, $18/month MongoDB, $23/month MySQL, all-inclusive of machine, disk and network costs. From the Dedicated Hosting Plans doc; the live /pricing/ calculator quotes higher figures (see notes).

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.

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.

Provider pages

ScaleGridManaged hosting for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and more, across six cloud providers via dedicated or bring-your-own-cloud plans.AivenManaged open-source data services across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, including PostgreSQL on plans that differ by node count and backup history.

Related comparisons

Aiven vs Amazon AuroraAiven vs Amazon RDSAiven vs Crunchy BridgeAiven vs Neo4jAiven vs NeonAiven vs NileAiven vs PlanetScaleAiven vs Prisma Postgres

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.