Neon
Serverless Postgres with branching, plus auth, storage, functions and an AI gateway, now part of the Databricks platform.
How the 7.4 was reached
- Quality of output6/10
Only independent evidence is a tiny G2 sample (4 reviews, 4.8 average); the rest is vendor description of restore and branching, so the score is held at the cap. g2.com
- Ease of use9/10
Free plan with no time limit and no credit card; docs list one-command setup, a full backend quickstart and app connection steps. neon.com
- Pricing value8/10
Free plan covers 100 projects with 100 CU-hrs each and 1 GB storage; published usage-based Launch plan at $0.106 per CU-hr, typical $15/mo. neon.com
- API and integration quality8/10
Docs list MCP, CLI and SDK access, eight languages, common ORMs (Prisma, Drizzle, SQLAlchemy) and import tools such as pg_dump and pgcopydb. neon.com
- Solves the problem it claims to solve6/10
Vendor describes isolated backend copies, rollback and a full backend platform; the only independent note flags cold-start latency from suspended computes, with low confidence. rfp.wiki
7.4/10 is the mean of the 5 criteria that apply. Scored on the five-criteria rubric v1, 10 October 2026. How scoring works
Pricing
- 1 GB Postgres storage per project
- Up to 100 projects included
- Serverless Postgres with branching
- Higher usage limits than Free
- Check neon.tech/pricing for current tiers and rates
Key Features
- Serverless Postgres (Lakebase) with storage-compute separation and autoscaling
- Database branching for development and testing workflows
- Instant restore for recovery after mistakes
- Managed authentication built on Better Auth, per the homepage
- S3-compatible object storage that branches
- Functions and an AI Gateway offering one API for frontier and open-source models
- Vector, keyword and hybrid search
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Branching lets teams copy a database for dev or testing without a full manual clone
- Free plan lists 1 GB storage per project across 100 projects
- Autoscaling suits bursty workloads, per Neon's use-case pages
- Standard Postgres keeps migration paths familiar
- Auth, storage, functions and AI Gateway reduce the need for separate vendors
Cons
- Newer backend extras (functions, storage, AI Gateway) have less track record than the Postgres core
- Ownership by Databricks may shape the roadmap and pricing in ways users cannot predict
- Usage-based pricing can be harder to forecast than a fixed-price instance
- 1 GB per project on Free is small for anything beyond prototypes
Neon is a strong pick for teams that want serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero behavior, and it is widely used as a backend for app-building agents. The wider backend bundle is attractive but newer, so check the docs and pricing page against your needs before committing production workloads.
Try Neon →Added to scored.tools on
Competitors to Neon
Other tools in the database category worth comparing.
Supabase
8.4/10Open-source Firebase alternative with Postgres, auth, storage, realtime, and edge functions.
PlanetScale
6.4/10World's fastest and most scalable cloud hosting for Vitess and Postgres databases.
MongoDB Atlas
7.4/10Managed MongoDB cloud database with vector search and agent tooling.
ClickHouse
8.0/10Fast open-source columnar database for real-time analytics and OLAP workloads
More Articles Featuring Neon
Neon Review 2026: Serverless Postgres, Pricing and Limits
Neon pairs serverless Postgres and branching with auth, storage and functions. Here is what the pricing and docs say, and where the gaps are.
pricingSupabase Pricing 2026: Free Tier vs Pro Plan ($25/mo) Breakdown
A builder's breakdown of Supabase's Free, Pro, and Team plans in 2026 — what you actually get, where the hidden costs hide, and which tier fits your stage.