9 PlanetScale alternatives, ranked

The world's most advanced open source relational database. Battle-tested, extensible, and loved by developers worldwide.

• Strong on: Rock-solid reliability
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Incredible extension ecosystem

Serverless Postgres that scales to zero. Branching for dev/preview environments. The future of Postgres hosting.

• Strong on: True serverless — scales to zero
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Git-like branching for databases

The open source Firebase alternative. Postgres under the hood with auth, storage, and realtime built in.

• Strong on: Full backend-as-a-service
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Great developer experience

The original document database. Flexible schema, horizontal scaling, and a massive ecosystem.

• Strong on: Flexible document model
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Easy to get started

In-memory data store used for caching, sessions, queues, and real-time features. Incredibly fast.

• Strong on: Sub-millisecond latency
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Versatile data structures

The most deployed database in the world. Zero-config, serverless, single-file. Perfect for edge and embedded.

• Strong on: Zero configuration
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Single file — easy backup

AWS's fully managed NoSQL database. Infinite scale, single-digit millisecond performance at any scale.

• Strong on: Infinite horizontal scale
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Fully managed

SQLite for production. Edge-replicated, embedded database powered by libSQL. Incredibly low latency.

• Strong on: SQLite at the edge
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Embedded replicas

Distributed SQL database that survives anything. PostgreSQL wire-compatible with global scale.

• Strong on: Survives node failures
• Addresses PlanetScale's tradeoff: No foreign keys (by design)
• Also: Global distribution