Neon versus Xata
However, they also differ in features, deployment options, and pricing.
Top reasons to choose Xata
Customers that have experience with both, appreciate Xata's performance and cost at scale, as well as the deployment flexibility.
Performance. We recommend testing the performance and cost of both services with your dataset and traffic. While both run PostgreSQL on the compute side and separate storage from compute, differences in storage architecture can result in significant performance differences.
Learn more about Xata's storage architecture- High performance at low cost
- Deployment flexibility
- 100% vanilla PostgreSQL
- Zero-downtime schema changes
Cost. Xata uses a simple pricing model based on the instance sizes and storage size, making it easy to compare it with services from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Neon pricing uses a tiered uses a tiered pricing model, with different costs for resources depending on the tier. This makes pricing less predictable.
Go to pricingBring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). Xata is the only service that allows you to run your PostgreSQL fully on your own cloud account or even on-premises, while still being a managed service. This gives you minimal latency, maximum control over your data, and the best security/compliance posture. It also allows you to put your cloud provider credits to use.
Learn more about BYOCSee how much you will save with Xata
Are you a current Neon customer looking to change your Postgres provider? Book a call with us and we will walk you through the performance and pricing benefits of Xata, as well as the extra functionality.
Works with your existing PostgreSQL service.
With Xata, even if you don't host production on our platform, you can still use instant Copy-on-Write branches, with anonymized production data.
Connect to your production database
Keep your production database where it is, whether it is AWS RDS, Aurora, GCP Cloud SQL, Azure Database, or even self-hosted.
Anonymize PII or other sensitive data
Using pgstream behind the scenes, mask sensitive data using configurable transformers that maintain referential integrity.
Staging replica with realistic data
Get a nightly synced replica of production with sensitive data removed. Ready for testing.
Instant dev branches
From the staging environment, instantly create Copy-on-Write branches for each pull request to accelerate development, testing, and collaboration.
Deploy to production without downtime
Apply database changes confidently with pgroll, serving old and new schema versions in parallel for smooth, lock-free migrations.
Only with Xata
Bring Your Own Cloud
You keep data ownership, we handle operations, updates, monitoring, and more.
Global control plane
Organizations, users, projects, the admin UI, and more are managed in the Xata control plane. The control plane is hosted by us.
Data plane in your cloud account
The actual Postgres instances, containing your data, are launched directly in your own AWS, GCP, Azure, or Hetzner account.
PostgreSQL runs on top of Kubernetes
We can use your existing Kubernetes cluster, or start a dedicated one. You pay your cloud provider directly, and your data is guaranteed to stay within your environment.
Let us manage the rest
Xata continues to fully manage the PostgreSQL platform: monitoring, backups, upgrades, high-availability, etc.
High-performance decoupled storage system
You keep data ownership, we handle operations, updates, monitoring, and more.
Global control plane
Organizations, users, projects, the admin UI, and more are managed in the Xata control plane. The control plane is hosted by us.
Data plane in your cloud account
The actual Postgres instances, containing your data, are launched directly in your own AWS, GCP, Azure, or Hetzner account.
PostgreSQL runs on top of Kubernetes
We can use your existing Kubernetes cluster, or start a dedicated one. You pay your cloud provider directly, and your data is guaranteed to stay within your environment.
Let us manage the rest
Xata continues to fully manage the PostgreSQL platform: monitoring, backups, upgrades, high-availability, etc.
Only with Xata
A complete schema changes workflow
Copy-on-Write branches solve only part of the schema change challenge: they let you test changes safely, but you still need a way to merge those changes back into your production branch. That’s where pgroll and zero-downtime schema changes come in.
With Xata, you can develop new features and test the corresponding schema changes in a development branch. This generates a pgroll migration plan. Because the database branches contain data similar to production, you can estimate migration time early and plan accordingly.
Thanks to pgroll’s design, migrations avoid long table locks. When needed, hidden columns and automatic backfills are used to ensure smooth transitions.
When you merge your development branch into production, your CI/CD pipeline runs the pgroll migration against the production database. Since pgroll exposes both old and new schema versions at the same time, you can perform a rolling upgrade of your application. No need for complex orchestration or multiple pull requests.
This enables a safe, streamlined schema change workflow, one that is only possible with Xata.
Learn more about schema changesPII/PHI anonymization and masking
Xata uses pgstream to anonymize and mask sensitive data while it is copied from the production database to the staging database. This means that the staging database doesn't contain any sensitive data, reducing the risk of leaking.
pgstream is an open source project for PostgreSQL data replication and transformation. It is using PostgreSQL logical replication (including DDL statements) as well as parallel snapshotting in order to copy data at maximum throughput.
Anonymization is accomplished by applying a set of column value transformations. Deterministic transformers ensure that the same data will be masked the same way every time. This means that your relational data stays consistent.
Learn more about anonymization and masking in Xata