PlanetScale vs Sanity
Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
vs. Structured content platform — headless CMS with real-time + GROQ
Pricing tiers
PlanetScale
Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5
Single-node EBS, 512 MiB RAM, arm64. Entry point for Postgres.
$5/mo
Postgres EBS HA — PS-5
3-node (primary + 2 replicas), 512 MiB, arm64.
$15/mo
Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10
Vitess MySQL sharded cluster, 1 GiB RAM.
$39/mo
Postgres Metal — M-10
3-node Metal, 1 GiB RAM + 10 GiB local storage. Much higher IOPS.
$50/mo
Vitess Metal — M-160
Vitess Metal, 16 GiB RAM + 110 GiB storage.
$609/mo
Enterprise
Custom agreements, dedicated regions, 99.99% SLA.
Custom
Sanity
Free
20 seats. 2 public datasets. 10K documents. 250K API req + 1M CDN req/month. Content Agent + live preview + visual editing.
Free
Growth
$15 per seat/month. 50 seats. 2 datasets (public or private). 25K docs. Same API limits + pay-as-you-go overages.
$15/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SAML SSO, Media Library, dedicated support, 99.99% SLA.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale vs free on Sanity.
| Metric | PlanetScale | Sanity |
|---|---|---|
| ha | 0 nodes | — |
| ram mib | 512 MiB | — |
Features
PlanetScale · 12 features
- Backups — Automated daily backups with retention.
- Database Branching — Git-like branches of your DB schema (not data). Create, diff, merge via deploy r…
- Deploy Requests — Schema changes in a feature branch get reviewed + auto-applied to main with zero…
- HIPAA — HIPAA-compliant deployments (Enterprise).
- Metal (NVMe) — Dedicated NVMe local storage. 10x IOPS vs EBS, latency-critical workloads.
- PgBouncer Pooler — Managed PgBouncer for Postgres clusters. Optional dedicated pooler.
- PlanetScale Boost — Query result cache with sub-ms reads.
- Point-in-Time Recovery — Restore cluster to any point within retention window.
- Postgres on PlanetScale — PostgreSQL 15+ with the same branching + deploy-request flow. Launched 2024.
- Query Insights — Per-query performance analytics, slow query tracking, explain plans.
- Read-only Regions — Route reads to the nearest region for lower latency.
- Vitess (MySQL at scale) — Horizontally-sharded MySQL (YouTube-scale) — original PlanetScale offering.
Sanity · 16 features
- Agent Context — Expose your content schema + docs to LLM agents.
- Content Agent (AI) — AI assistant inside Studio for generation + translation.
- Content History — Every change versioned. Rollback + diff.
- Content Lake — Distributed real-time DB for structured content. Multi-region replicas.
- Datasets — Logical content partitions (stage/prod/etc.). Easy cloning.
- GROQ — Graph-Relational Object Queries — JSON-native query language.
- Image CDN — Smart transforms (crop, format, quality) via URL params.
- Internationalization — Multiple locales per document with native i18n plugins.
- Live Previews — Draft previews with stega-encoded content.
- Media Library (Ent) — Org-wide media with DAM features.
- Portable Text — Structured rich text format (JSON). Portable across channels.
- Real-Time Collaboration — Live presence + collaborative editing.
- Sanity Studio — Open-source React editor — customize with your own components + workflow.
- Scheduled Publishing — Schedule content to publish at a future date.
- Visual Editing — Click-to-edit inline on your Next.js/etc. website.
- Webhooks — Events on create/update/delete with GROQ filter.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | PlanetScale | Sanity |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) | Sanity CLI |
| SDK | @planetscale/database | @sanity/client, sanity-python, @sanity/ui + next-sanity |
| REST | Management API | Image CDN, Sanity HTTP API |
| MCP | PlanetScale MCP | Sanity MCP |
| OTHER | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol | GROQ Query Language, Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to PlanetScale and Sanity are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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