Neon
Serverless Postgres owned by Databricks (May 2025). Separates compute and storage, autoscaling, scale-to-zero when inactive, and instant branching (copy-on-write) to clone the DB on every PR. Standard Postgres, so portable.
Strengths
- Instant branching: a real isolated DB per PR to test without breaking prod
- Scale-to-zero, billed at zero when inactive (ideal for personal projects and previews)
- Native Postgres, portable to RDS, Supabase or self-hosted without rewriting
- Native Vercel integration via marketplace, auto-branching per PR
Limitations
- No built-in auth/storage, combine with Clerk/Auth.js + S3
- Cold start latency on scale-to-zero (~500ms-1s), annoying for latency-critical APIs
- Recently bought by Databricks, uncertainty on independent roadmap
Best for
- Teams wanting an isolated DB per PR (CI/CD test data)
- Vercel projects that don't need Supabase auth
- Apps with intermittent traffic (admin tools, internal apps)