Side-by-side comparison of free tiers, pricing changes, and stability. Catalogue dates here run to 2026-10-06.
Quick Verdict: Neon is serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero. Turso is edge-native SQLite with global replication. Both are modern, developer-friendly databases — Neon for Postgres compatibility, Turso for ultra-low-latency edge reads.
Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, Neon Auth (60K MAU), auto-scaling up to 2 CU, scale-to-zero, 5 GB of Object Storage, and Functions (10 active capacity-hours, 400 waiting capacity-hours, 1M invocations). No credit card is required.
On the Free plan, scale to zero can't be disabled: computes suspend after 5 minutes of inactivity. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/plans, read 2026-10-04.)
Running out of CU-hours or network transfer suspends the compute until the next billing period or an upgrade. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/plans, read 2026-10-04.)
At the storage cap, inserts, updates and deletes fail until space is freed or the plan is upgraded. (From neon.com/docs/introduction/plans, read 2026-10-04.)
Neon's Azure East US 2, West US 3, and Germany West Central regions no longer accept new projects as of April 7, 2026; Free-plan projects there inactive for 90+ days may be deleted after October 5, 2026. (From neon.com/docs/import/azure-regions-deprecation, read 2026-10-07.)
Database engine: Neon runs PostgreSQL (full compatibility, extensions, SQL ecosystem). Turso runs libSQL (SQLite fork with server mode and replication).
Free tier: Neon offers 1 GB of storage per project (20 GB in total), 100 CU-hours/month, up to 100 projects. Turso offers 5 GB storage, 100 databases, 500M rows read/month — significantly more storage.
Edge story: Turso replicates data to edge locations for sub-millisecond reads. Neon runs in a single region but offers a serverless driver for edge function compatibility.
Branching: Neon's killer feature is instant database branching — create full copies for CI/CD preview environments in seconds. Turso doesn't have an equivalent.
Pricing Change History
Neon
increasedeffective 2026-10-01medium impact
Neon raised the Free plan's Postgres storage from 0.5 GB to 1 GB per project and added a limit of 20 GB across all of an account's projects. Source ↗
increasedeffective 2026-03-13medium impact
Neon's Free plan went from one member per organization to unlimited members. Source ↗
increasedeffective 2025-12-19medium impact
Neon raised the Free plan's project limit from 80 to 100, the last of seven increases since 2025-08-29, when the limit was 10. Source ↗
increasedeffective 2025-12-12medium impact
Neon made Neon Auth available on all plans, including Free. Source ↗
increasedeffective 2025-09-19medium impact
Neon doubled the Free plan's compute from 50 to 100 CU-hours per project a month. Source ↗
Turso
No recorded pricing changes for Turso.
Our Recommendation
Choose Neon if you need PostgreSQL compatibility, database branching for development workflows, or plan to use an ORM that expects Postgres (Django, Rails, Prisma).
Choose Turso if you need edge-native reads, SQLite simplicity, or are building with frameworks that work well with SQLite (Laravel, Remix with better-sqlite3).
Neon is serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero. Turso is edge-native SQLite with global replication. Both are modern, developer-friendly databases — Neon for Postgres compatibility, Turso for ultra-low-latency edge reads.
What is Neon's free tier?
Neon offers a Free plan: Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), up to 100 projects, 10 branches per proj...
Choose Neon if you need PostgreSQL compatibility, database branching for development workflows, or plan to use an ORM that expects Postgres (Django, Rails, Prisma). Choose Turso if you need edge-native reads, SQLite simplicity, or are building with frameworks that work well with SQLite (Laravel, Remix with better-sqlite3).
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