Neon vs PlanetScale vs Turso vs Supabase vs Firebase in 2026

These get compared as if they were interchangeable databases, and they are not. Two of them sell you a database. Two of them sell you most of a backend. One of them sells you a database that lives close to your users. Picking on price before deciding which of those three you want is how teams end up migrating twice.

The prices below came off the vendors’ pricing pages on 21 August 2026.

What each one is actually selling

Neon and PlanetScale sell managed databases and nothing else. You bring your own auth, your own storage, your own API layer. What you get is a Postgres or MySQL endpoint run by people who do that professionally, with branching and scaling behavior that ordinary managed Postgres does not have.

Supabase and Firebase sell a backend: database, authentication, object storage, and generated APIs, with client libraries that let a frontend talk to all of it. That saves weeks at the start and is the thing that is hardest to leave later, because the auth and storage layers become load bearing well before the database does.

Turso is the odd one, and the interesting one. It is SQLite shaped, sold by rows read and rows written rather than by compute hours, and designed for many small databases rather than one large one. Per tenant databases and edge deployments are where that shape wins and where nothing else on this list competes directly.

The pricing units, which is where the surprises live

	Free tier	What you pay for after that
Neon	100 CU hours, 0.5 GB storage per project	$0.106 per CU hour on Launch, $0.35 per GB month storage
PlanetScale	None	Cluster size plus storage, backups, and egress, from roughly $5 to $15 a month for the smallest Postgres nodes
Turso	5 GB, 500M rows read, 10M rows written	$4.99 a month on Developer, $24.92 on Scaler, then per billion rows read
Supabase	500 MB database, 2 active projects, paused after a week idle	$25 a month on Pro, which includes $10 of compute credit; compute add ons from $10 to $410 a month
Firebase	1 GiB Firestore, 50k reads and 20k writes a day	Blaze is metered Google Cloud pricing, with the free quotas still applied daily

Neon’s compute hour unit is the one people misjudge. A database that scales to zero between requests bills almost nothing; a database that never idles because a health check hits it every thirty seconds bills continuously. The free tier suspends compute until the next billing month when you exhaust it, which is a hard stop rather than a slowdown.

Supabase’s free tier fails differently. Projects pause after a week of inactivity, which is fine for a side project and disqualifying for anything a customer might visit on a slow week. Two active projects is the other limit people hit first.

Firebase’s quotas are enforced per day and reset at midnight, so a bad loop that burns 50,000 reads by noon takes your app down until tomorrow rather than presenting a bill. On Blaze the same loop presents a bill instead. Which of those failure modes you prefer is a real decision, and the answer changes once you have paying users.

PlanetScale simply does not have a free tier anymore, and it is more honest about the cost of running a production database because of it. That also means it does not belong on a shortlist for a project that might never make money.

Postgres compatibility is no longer the differentiator

Neon is Postgres. Supabase is Postgres. PlanetScale now sells both Postgres and its Vitess based MySQL, so the “MySQL only” line that used to separate it is gone. Turso is the one that is not Postgres, and its SQLite lineage is a deliberate design choice rather than a gap.

What separates them now is the operational model. Neon’s branching gives you a database per pull request cheaply, which changes how teams test migrations. PlanetScale’s Vitess heritage shows up as sharding and online schema change tooling that is genuinely ahead of the field when you are large enough to need it. Supabase gives you the rest of the backend. Turso gives you a database per tenant without a per database cost that makes it absurd.

The connection problem is yours either way

All of these sit behind the same constraint: Postgres forks a process per connection, and serverless functions open connections faster than any instance can absorb them. Neon and Supabase both ship poolers for exactly this reason, and using them means transaction pooling mode, which quietly breaks session state, LISTEN and NOTIFY, and session scoped advisory locks.

That is not a vendor problem and switching vendors does not solve it. If you are heading toward serverless functions in front of Postgres, read how the poolers behave before you pick, because the answer affects how you write queries more than which logo is on the dashboard.

Choosing

Building a product that needs auth and file uploads next week, with Postgres underneath: Supabase. The $25 Pro tier is the real starting price, because the free tier’s pausing behavior makes it a development environment rather than a hosting plan.

Mobile app, document shaped data, and you want to ship rather than model: Firebase. Set a budget alert on day one, and understand that leaving Firestore later is a rewrite rather than a migration.

You already have a backend and want the database to be good: Neon if you want branching and scale to zero, PlanetScale if you are heading somewhere that needs sharding and can pay from the start.

Many small databases, one per tenant or one per edge location: Turso, and none of the others are really competing for that job.

The cheapest way to test any of this is to run your actual schema and your actual peak hour against the free tier and see which limit you hit first. The limit you hit is the one that will define your bill later, and it is almost never the one the pricing page leads with.