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Neon vs PlanetScale

Neon scores higher on the AgentReady, 90/100 against 64/100. They differ on 8 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Neon. The backend for apps and agents, built to scale on Lakebase Postgres.

PlanetScale. PlanetScale provides the world's fastest and most scalable cloud databases, offering fully-managed Vitess and PostgreSQL clusters with exceptional speed, reliability, and horizontal scalability through sharding.

Where Neon is ahead

Neon passes self-service signup, and PlanetScale does not. That is adopt, whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop.

Where PlanetScale is ahead

PlanetScale passes search discoverable and public docs discoverable, and Neon does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds adopt: no mandatory sales call, copyable quickstart and official typescript sdk. Neon misses those.

And on operate, canonical workflow succeeds and observable execution. Neon misses those.

What neither does

Both fail openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, official python sdk, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Both sit at 100/100 here. Neon misses search discoverable, public docs discoverable; PlanetScale misses nothing.

Understand. Neon leads 83 to 46. Neon misses openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; PlanetScale misses openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented.

Adopt is whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop. Neon leads 100 to 55. Neon misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart, official typescript sdk, official python sdk; PlanetScale misses self-service signup, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, official python sdk.

Operate. Neon leads 78 to 56. Neon misses canonical workflow succeeds, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, observable execution; PlanetScale misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable.

Pricing

Neon does not publish a machine-readable starting price. PlanetScale starts at $5/mo.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

PlanetScale clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Neon and PlanetScale. Alternatives to each: Neon, PlanetScale.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["neon", "planetscale"]}