Neon
Serverless Postgres with instant branching and scale-to-zero.
Acquired — still operating
Acquired by Databricks in 2025; still operating as a standalone product.
About
Neon is a serverless Postgres platform built on a storage-compute separation architecture: compute scales elastically and idles to zero while storage persists, so development databases cost nothing when unused. Its standout feature is instant database branching — copy-on-write clones of a full Postgres database for preview environments, per-PR testing, and schema experiments without provisioning or dump/restore cycles.
Since 2025 Neon has operated as part of Databricks, positioning itself as the backend for apps and agents with added primitives for authentication, object storage, functions, and an AI gateway. The Neon engine is open source on GitHub (23,000+ stars) under Apache 2.0, while the hosted cloud is usage-based with a free tier. Branches, point-in-time restore, and connection pooling over a standard Postgres wire protocol make it a drop-in replacement for self-hosted Postgres in most stacks.
What it can do
- Serverless Postgres with autoscaling and scale-to-zero compute
- Instant copy-on-write database branches
- Point-in-time restore and built-in connection pooling
- Auth, object storage, functions, and AI gateway primitives
- Open-source engine under Apache 2.0
Setup
Sign up at neon.com, create a project, and copy the Postgres connection string into your app.
Prerequisites
A Neon account; any Postgres-compatible client or ORM.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 9/10
Scored 9/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via official site at https://neon.com (Databricks ownership banner, branching, scale-to-zero, Auth/storage/functions/AI gateway); GitHub neondatabase/neon: 23,209 stars via API 2026-10-15; engine Apache 2.0; Databricks acquisition 2025 confirmed on official site. License: Engine Apache 2.0; hosted platform commercial.
★ 23,209 GitHub stars
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.