Turso vs Xata

Turso takes SQLite and makes it work as a cloud database. Its design goal is many small databases rather than one big one: you can give every user, workspace or AI agent its own isolated database, and idle ones cost only storage. Embedded replication lets the same database run inside your app or on a user’s device, reading and writing locally and syncing with the cloud. Turso no longer offers edge replicas in multiple regions to new users.

The free tier gives you 5 GB of storage, 100 databases, 500 million row reads and 10 million row writes a month. Paid plans start with Developer at $4.99 a month billed yearly ($5.99 monthly) and Scaler at $24.92 billed yearly ($29 monthly). On 2 October 2026 Turso announced that it is being acquired by Supabase. It says the service keeps running as before and the open-source engine stays in active development; the announcement does not mention plan or price changes. If your app is read-heavy or naturally split per tenant, Turso is fast and cheap. If you need complex relational queries or heavy write throughput, Postgres on Neon or Supabase is a better foundation.

Xata is a Postgres platform built around branching. You can start a fresh database or branch an existing one in seconds. Each branch gets its own schema, compute and data, but shares storage with its parent through copy-on-write, so you pay only for what changes. Idle branches hibernate and use no compute until the next query. Xata also maintains two open-source Postgres tools: pgroll for zero-downtime schema migrations and pgstream for anonymizing personal data.

The open-source edition is free to self-host. Xata Cloud starts with a 14-day trial, then bills by the hour: the smallest instance costs $0.012 an hour, about $9 a month, plus $0.28 per GB of storage. For a solo founder who needs one database, Supabase or Neon are simpler starting points with free tiers. Xata makes more sense once you want a separate database branch for every pull request, preview environment or coding agent.