ClickHouse vs PlanetScale Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| ClickHouse | PlanetScale | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | Custom |
| Number of plans | 3 | 2 |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | |
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
Basic
- Up to 1 TB storage
- 8-12 GiB total memory
- Backups every 24h, retained for 1 day
- 1 availability zone
- Export backups to your own cloud account
- Expert support with 1 business day response time
- Single sign-on authentication (SSO) using Google or Microsoft Social login
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Scale
- Unlimited storage
- Configurable memory
- Compute-compute separation
- Backups every 24h, retained for 1 day
- Configurable backups
- 2+ availability zones
- Expert support with 1 hour response time 24x7 for Severity 1 issues
- S3 role-based access
- Private networking
- Automatic vertical scaling
- Manual horizontal scaling
Enterprise
- SAML Single sign-on authentication (SSO)
- Private regions
- Manual vertical scaling for custom profiles
- Enterprise support with 30 min response time for Severity 1 issues
- Named Lead Support Engineer
- Transparent data encryption / CMEK
- Scheduled upgrades
- Consultative migrations guides
- HIPAA and PCI compliance
Base Plan
- Single node — Starting at $5/month for development and low-traffic workloads
- Metal — Starting at $50/month with local NVMe storage for high-performance needs
- High Availability — 1 primary + 2 replicas across 3 availability zones
- MySQL-compatible databases with horizontal sharding (Vitess)
- Instance and VTGate sizes
- Storage amount — First 10 GB included, and then $0.50 per GB per instance
- Add-ons — Additional development branch hours, SSO, upgraded support
Enterprise
- Bring your own cloud
- Upgraded support
- Database expertise
- Migration assistance
- Slack-based support
- More deployment options
- Business support included
- Architecture consultation
- Custom pricing
- Additional regions
ClickHouse vs PlanetScale FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Neither has a free plan. But ClickHouse offers a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a usage-based model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. ClickHouse: ClickHouse is going after the high-performance OLAP segment — think Snowflake and BigQuery alternatives for teams that care deeply about query speed on large datasets. The pricing is competitive for raw compute but the multi-dimensional billing (compute + storage + egress + ingestion) can stack up fast, positioning them as a serious tool for data-heavy teams rather than a budget play. PlanetScale: They're threading the needle between managed Postgres commodities (Neon, Supabase) and premium database-as-a-service players (Aurora, AlloyDB) — not the cheapest option, but positioning on performance and MySQL/Postgres flexibility for teams that have outgrown basic managed DBs. The AWS and GCP Marketplace availability signals they're going after cloud-native teams with existing marketplace spend commitments.
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