Neon
Serverless Postgres with branching, autoscaling, edge drivers, and built-in auth. Now backed by Databricks
Scorecard
overall 8.4/10The good
- 01Scale-to-zero means you pay nothing when your database is idle: ideal for dev, staging, and low-traffic production
- 02Database branching works like Git branches: instant copy-on-write clones for dev, preview, and testing
- 03Serverless driver works on edge runtimes (Vercel Edge, Cloudflare Workers) without persistent connections
- 04Neon Auth gives Neon a first-party auth story without changing the underlying Postgres-first mental model
- 05Databricks acquisition (May 2025) led to significant price drops. Storage fell from $1.75 to $0.35/GB-month
- 06It's just PostgreSQL, and every ORM, tool, and library that works with Postgres works with Neon
The not-so-good
- 01Still a database-first platform, not a full backend stack with storage and realtime bundled the way Supabase is
- 02Connection cold starts from scale-to-zero can add latency to first requests
- 03Usage-based pricing requires monitoring to avoid unexpected bills on high-traffic apps
- 04The Databricks acquisition introduces some uncertainty about long-term product direction
- →Next.js and serverless applications that need PostgreSQL without connection management headaches
- →Development workflows that benefit from database branching (preview deploys, CI testing)
- →Projects that want pure PostgreSQL without vendor-specific features or lock-in
- →Low-to-medium traffic applications where scale-to-zero keeps costs near zero
- →Teams that want auth, file storage, and real-time subscriptions bundled with their database
- →High-throughput applications that can't tolerate cold-start latency
- →Teams that prefer a fixed monthly bill over usage-based pricing
Our take
Neon is the database this site runs on, so take this review with that context, but we chose it for specific reasons that hold up on their own merits.
The core pitch is serverless PostgreSQL that actually scales to zero. When nobody is querying your database, you're not paying for compute. When traffic spikes, it scales up automatically. For development and staging environments, this means your costs are effectively zero. For low-traffic production apps (which is most apps), the usage-based Launch tier is hard to beat when compute can scale down between bursts.
Database branching is the feature that changes workflows. You can create an instant copy of your production database for a preview deployment, run a migration against it, and throw it away, without provisioning a separate instance or managing snapshots. It's copy-on-write under the hood, so it's fast and cheap. Pair this with Vercel's preview deploys and each PR gets its own isolated database automatically.
The biggest positioning change is that Neon is no longer just "database and nothing else." Neon Auth is now built in, based on Better Auth, so Neon has a credible first-party answer for app authentication. That still doesn't make it a Supabase-style backend platform. The center of gravity is very much Postgres itself, which many teams will prefer.
The Databricks acquisition in May 2025 was good for pricing. Storage dropped from $1.75 to $0.35 per GB-month, though it introduces the standard big-company-acquisition uncertainty about long-term direction. So far, Neon has continued operating independently with its own pricing and roadmap.
If you want a database-first platform (standard PostgreSQL, excellent serverless characteristics, strong branching, and now a built-in auth option), Neon is one of the strongest products in the category. If you want a broader backend bundle with storage and realtime as first-class features, Supabase is still the better fit.
Alternatives to Neon
See all →
Firebase
Google's all-in-one backend platform with real-time database, auth, hosting, and cloud functions
PlanetScale
Vitess-powered MySQL and now PostgreSQL, with branching, sharding, and enterprise-grade scaling
Supabase
The open-source Firebase alternative. PostgreSQL, auth, storage, and real-time in one platform