Facts read November 6, 2026
Neon vs Turso
Neon is Cuely's default database pick when your description doesn't favor either one: plain Postgres that scales to zero, with a branch per preview environment. Pick Turso if you care most about a database per customer.
Side by side
| Fact | Neon | Turso |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Serverless Postgres with scale-to-zero and database branching. | SQLite-compatible database built for many small databases. |
| Free plan | Free, no card: 100 CU-hours per project, autoscaling up to 2 CU, 1 GB storage per project, 10 branches and 5 GB egress per project. | Free, no card: 100 databases, 5 GB storage, 500 million rows read and 10 million rows written per month. |
| Paid from | Launch: pay as you go, no monthly minimum: $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month. | Developer: $4.99/month (unlimited databases, 9 GB storage). |
| At 1,000 users | $0/month | $0/month |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | No | No |
| Best for | Postgres on serverless hosts; A database branch per pull request; Low idle cost | A database per tenant or per user; Embedded and local-first apps; Read-heavy workloads |
| Watch out | Compute scales to zero after 5 minutes idle on Free, so the first query after a pause is slower. | SQLite semantics, not Postgres; many ORMs and extensions differ. |
Where they differ
The published scores, from −3 to +3, that decide which one Cuely picks for each need.
| Need | Neon | Turso |
|---|---|---|
| a database per customer | +1 Up to 100 free projects; branches and projects are cheap to create by API. | +3 Designed for many databases; 100 are free and Developer is unlimited. |
| native iOS or Android app | −2 No phone-app client library, so a phone app needs a server of your own in between. | 0 No particular strength here. |
| Next.js or React | +1 Serverless driver works well from Vercel functions. | 0 No particular strength here. |
| regulated or compliance-sensitive | +1 SOC 2 and HIPAA (with a BAA) are listed on the Scale plan. | 0 No particular strength here. |
| fewer vendors | +1 Neon Auth adds managed auth in the same database. | 0 No particular strength here. |
| global low latency | 0 No particular strength here. | +1 Embedded replicas can serve reads close to users. |
Sources: Neon pricing (read November 6, 2026), Turso pricing (read November 6, 2026). No vendor pays for placement.