# Aiven

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/databases/aiven/

Managed open-source data services across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, including PostgreSQL on plans that differ by node count and backup history.

## Who it suits

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 if 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.

## iScore

69 / 100 (80% interval 63–75), rank 3 of 14 in databases — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Read this score with care:
- Capacity and limits is thin: 2 of 7 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (40–52). Read the interval, not the point.
- Adoption is thin: 0 of 1 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (8–99). Read the interval, not the point.
- Documented but not scored, because the page states it as text with no comparable number or a yes/limited/no (a one-time, usage-based or other-vendor price, or a per-site choice): free_expires, pitr_window, read_replicas, regions. Read them on the provider page; the score neither rewards nor penalises what it could not compare.

Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every databases peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/databases/aiven/alternatives/

- Price: 73 (62–85), weight 25%, 4 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: egress_overage_price, free_expires
- Capacity and limits: 46 (40–52), weight 20%, 2 of 7 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: entry_plan_memory, entry_plan_storage, pitr_window, read_replicas, regions
- Capabilities: 75 (69–82), weight 20%, 3 of 5 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backtrack, scale_to_zero
- Trust and compliance: 81 (75–87), weight 15%, 7 of 13 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: audit_logs, customer_managed_keys, dedicated_infrastructure, gdpr_data_residency, pci_dss, rbac
- Evidence: 88 (88–88), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 53 (8–99), weight 10%, 0 of 1 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/concepts/free-plan), read 2026-09-09)
- Kind of free offer: Always free ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/concepts/free-plan), read 2026-09-09)
- Credit card to start: No ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/concepts/free-plan), read 2026-09-13)
- When the free offer ends: Never — free services have no time limitations. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/concepts/free-plan), read 2026-09-13)
- Entry paid plan: $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. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing), read 2026-09-09)
- Pricing model: 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), read 2026-09-09)
- Startup credit program: 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), read 2026-09-11)

### Execution

- Managed connection pooling: Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-connection-pooling), read 2026-09-09)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 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), read 2026-09-09)
- Uptime SLA: 99.99% from Startup ($75/month), the entry paid plan, upward. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing), read 2026-09-14)

### Data

- Engine: 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), read 2026-09-09)
- Connection limit: 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/reference/pg-connection-limits), read 2026-09-09)
- Database branching: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/howto/fork-service), read 2026-09-09)
- Point-in-time recovery: 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups), read 2026-09-09)
- Read replicas: Supported ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/howto/create-read-replica), read 2026-09-09)
- Backup retention: 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), read 2026-09-09)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: 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. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing), read 2026-09-14)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: We also provide ISAE 3000/SOC2 Type II reports. ([source](https://aiven.io/security-compliance), read 2026-09-22)
- HIPAA: Our services are ISO 27000-series, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant. ([source](https://aiven.io/security-compliance), read 2026-09-22)
- Encryption at rest: All data is fully encrypted end-to-end at rest and in transit. ([source](https://aiven.io/security-compliance), read 2026-09-22)
- Private networking / VPC: Deploy services directly into your own cloud account for data residency and VPC peering. ([source](https://aiven.io/), read 2026-09-21)

## Compared with

- [Aiven vs Neon](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-neon/)
- [Aiven vs Crunchy Bridge](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-crunchy-bridge/)
- [Aiven vs ScaleGrid](https://inetgeek.com/compare/scalegrid-vs-aiven/)
- [Aiven vs Amazon Aurora](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-amazon-aurora/)
- [Aiven vs Amazon RDS](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-amazon-rds/)
- [Aiven vs Neo4j](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-neo4j/)
- [Aiven vs Nile](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-nile/)
- [Aiven vs PlanetScale](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-planetscale/)
- [Aiven vs Prisma Postgres](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-prisma-postgres/)
- [Aiven vs Supabase](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-supabase/)
- [Aiven vs TigerData](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-tigerdata/)
- [Aiven vs Turso](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-turso/)