Vitess, Neki, and Postgres

PlanetScale offers Vitess (our MySQL-compatible engine), Neki (sharded Postgres), and Postgres. All three provide PlanetScale’s signature branching workflow and enterprise-grade scaling capabilities.

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Feature comparison

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Which product should you choose?

For most teams, choose based on your existing database experience:

• Choose Vitess if you’re currently using MySQL or have a large-scale cluster that requires horizontal sharding
• Choose Neki when your Postgres workload could benefit from online schema changes or horizontal sharding
• Choose Postgres if you’re currently using PostgreSQL or prefer its feature set

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Scale considerations

Metal clusters with over 100 TB of storage handle throughput and latency much better than traditional EBS-backed instances. Check out our benchmarks to see how Metal stacks up against other providers. When a single cluster is no longer enough, Vitess provides explicit sharding for MySQL-compatible workloads, and Neki adds horizontal sharding for Postgres. See Neki vs Vitess to compare their differences. If your workload can run on a single shard, Postgres is a strong choice. There are also benefits to using Neki on a single shard, which puts you in a better position if you later need to shard. See Neki vs PlanetScale Postgres.