Side-by-side comparison · Databases & Backend
Clerk vs Neon vs PlanetScale
Everything that matters when choosing between them, in one place: our rating, what each can do, what they cost, and the trade-offs.
Comparing 3 tools, the maximum.
At a glance
Pick it if: Anyone building a web or mobile app who needs user accounts and logins without writing them from scratch.
Pick it if: Developers and Claude Code users who want a dependable Postgres database and nothing else.
Pick it if: Teams running a real product who need their database to stay fast and never go missing.
Clerk scores highest overall, but Neon gives you more for your money. Which one is right comes down to what you value most.
Overview
| Attribute | Clerk | Neon | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| In one line | Ready-made sign-up, login and user accounts you can add to an app in minutes. | A Postgres database that switches off when idle, so side projects cost nothing. | Fast, serious databases for apps that have outgrown the free tiers. |
| Pricing model | Freemium | Freemium | Paid |
| Starting price | $20/mo | Pay as you go | From $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes | No |
| Works with Claude Code | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Rating breakdown
Our scores out of 5. The higher bar in each row is highlighted.
| Attribute | Clerk | Neon | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall rating | 4.4Winner | 4.2 | 4.1 |
| Ease of useHow quickly someone non-technical gets value from it. | 4.5 | 3.5 | 3.0 |
| FeaturesHow completely it covers its own job, and how well the pieces fit together. | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 |
| Output qualityHow good the results are before you fix them. | 4.5 | 4.5 | 5.0 |
| Value for moneyWhat you get for the price, including the free plan. | 4.0 | 4.5 | 3.0 |
| Speed & reliabilityHow fast it is and how often it falls over. | 4.5 | 4.0 | 5.0 |
Feature comparison
A tick means it does this today. A dash means we haven't checked.
| Attribute | Clerk | Neon | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access & platform | |||
| Free plan | Yes | Yes | No |
| Mobile app | No | No | No |
| Desktop app | No | No | No |
| Browser extension | No | No | No |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Teams & business | |||
| Team workspace | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise plan or SSO | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Connects to other apps | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open source or self-hosted | No | Yes | No |
| AI abilities | |||
| Works with your files | No | No | No |
| Understands images | – | No | No |
| Makes images | No | No | No |
| Makes video | No | No | No |
| Writes code | No | Yes | No |
| Runs agents or automations | – | No | No |
| Learns your brand or style | – | No | No |
| Works in many languages | Yes | – | – |
| Capabilities score | 6/ 17 | 7/ 17 | 4/ 17 |
Pricing
Plans as listed on each vendor's site when we last checked. Confirm before you buy.
| Attribute | Clerk | Neon | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans | Hobby Free New apps and side projects. | FreeOur pick Free Side projects and learning. | Postgres, single node From $5/mo Staging and small apps that can tolerate a restart. |
ProOur pick $20/mo billed yearly, or $25 monthly Apps with paying customers. | Launch Pay as you go, no monthly minimum Small production apps. | Postgres, high availabilityOur pick From $15/mo Production apps with paying users. | |
Business $250/mo billed yearly, or $300 monthly Growing companies that need compliance paperwork. | Scale Pay as you go, higher rates Teams needing an SLA and bigger databases. | Metal From $50/mo Apps where database speed is the bottleneck. | |
Enterprise Custom Large companies with strict security needs. | Vitess (MySQL) From $39/mo MySQL apps that need to shard as they grow. | ||
Enterprise Custom Single-tenant or fully managed setups. | |||
| Which plan to pick | Build on Hobby. It's enough until you have customers who care about the Clerk branding or need multi-factor login, then move to Pro. Business only matters when a customer asks for a SOC 2 report. | Free covers more than you'd expect, including several small live apps. Move to Launch when a project needs more than 100 compute hours a month or a longer restore window. Scale is for teams that need an SLA, not for individuals. | Don't start here for a weekend project; Neon or Supabase are free. When a product has paying customers, the $15 high-availability Postgres is the sensible entry point. Only go to Metal once Insights shows the disk is the slow part. |
Key features
| Attribute | Clerk | Neon | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
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Pros and cons
| Attribute | Clerk | Neon | PlanetScale |
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Who each one is for
| Attribute | Clerk | Neon | PlanetScale |
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Questions people ask
Which is better, Clerk, Neon or PlanetScale?
Clerk scores highest overall in our ratings (Clerk 4.4/5, Neon 4.2/5 and PlanetScale 4.1/5). Clerk is best for adding sign-up and login to an app and Google, Apple and passwordless sign-in. Neon is best for postgres for side projects and safe database experiments with branching. PlanetScale is best for production apps with paying users and predictable database performance.
Which is cheaper, Clerk, Neon or PlanetScale?
Clerk: There's a free plan, and paid plans start at $20/mo. Neon: There's a free plan, and paid plans start at Pay as you go. PlanetScale: There's no free plan. Paid plans start at From $5/mo.
Which is easier to use, Clerk, Neon or PlanetScale?
Clerk rates highest for ease of use in our scores. Anyone building a web or mobile app who needs user accounts and logins without writing them from scratch.
How we compare
Ratings are our own, from using each tool, across ease of use, features, output quality, value for money, speed & reliability.
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