Neon

Neon is a serverless Postgres platform. It provides fully managed PostgreSQL databases where storage and compute are separated, so compute can scale up under load, scale down when idle and even pause to zero, and new databases can be created in seconds through an API. The architecture enables features that traditional managed Postgres struggles with. Branching is the headline: you can create an instant, copy-on-write branch of a database, including its data, for a pull request, a preview deployment, a test run or a risky migration, and discard it afterwards. That brings Git-like workflows to the database layer and makes realistic testing much cheaper. Point-in-time restore uses the same underlying storage design. Scale-to-zero suits workloads that are bursty or idle much of the time - side projects, development environments, internal tools and multi-tenant products that give each customer a separate database. It has also made Neon popular as the database behind AI coding agents and app builders that spin up many short-lived projects. Neon was acquired by Databricks, which has positioned it as a Postgres foundation for AI-driven applications. Because it is real Postgres, standard drivers, ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle, and extensions like pgvector work as expected. A serverless driver supports connections from edge and serverless runtimes over HTTP and WebSockets. The trade-offs include cold-start latency when a paused database wakes, which matters for latency-sensitive apps unless autoscaling minimums are set, and a usage-based pricing model that requires some attention at scale. Alternatives include Supabase, which wraps Postgres with authentication, storage and APIs; AWS Aurora Serverless and RDS for teams committed to AWS; Crunchy Bridge and other managed Postgres hosts; PlanetScale for MySQL and Postgres with branching; and Turso for SQLite at the edge. Choose Neon when you want Postgres with instant branching and costs that track real usage.