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PlanetScale offers two powerful database products: Postgres (our PostgreSQL engine) and Vitess (our MySQL-compatible engine). Both provide PlanetScale’s signature branching workflow and enterprise-grade scaling capabilities.

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Feature comparison

FeaturePostgresVitess
Branching✅ Schema and data branches✅ Schema and data branches
Deploy requests❌ Not available✅ Online schema changes
Horizontal sharding🔜 (Neki coming soon)✅ Explicit sharding
Read replicas✅✅
Read-only regions❌✅
Serverless driver✅✅
Connection pooling✅ Built-in (PgBouncer)✅ Built-in
Query Insights✅✅
Automatic and custom backups✅✅
PITR✅❌
Multi-region✅✅
SQL compatibilityFully PostgreSQL compatibleSome MySQL compatibility limitations
Multiple logical databases per cluster✅ CREATE DATABASE❌ (use keyspaces instead)
Max cluster sizeSingle clusterUnlimited shards

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Which product should you choose?

For most teams, choose based on your existing database experience:
  • Choose Postgres if you’re currently using PostgreSQL or prefer its feature set
  • Choose Vitess if you’re currently using MySQL or have a large-scale cluster that requires near-term horizontal sharding

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Scale considerations

If you’re operating at massive scale (multi-TB datasets, tens to hundreds of thousands of QPS), Vitess is currently the best option. We’ve successfully migrated several large PostgreSQL workloads to Vitess for customers who needed unlimited horizontal scaling. However, if you can manage on a single PostgreSQL cluster for the foreseeable future, staying on Postgres might be the right choice. We’re developing Neki, our sharded PostgreSQL solution, which will bring Vitess-style horizontal sharding to PostgreSQL. We offer Metal clusters with over 100 TB of storage that handle throughput and latency much better than traditional EBS-backed instances. Check out our benchmarks to see how Metal stacks up against other providers.