PlanetScale vs Spider Cloud

Side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, and ratings

Analysis reviewed Live tool data as of 2026-09-01
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At a glance

DimensionPlanetScaleSpider Cloud
PricingPaid (starting at $39/mo for 10GB storage, 10M row reads)Freemium (Free tier: 500 pages/mo; Pay-as-you-go from $0.003 per page)
Primary UseScalable cloud database (MySQL/Postgres) with horizontal shardingWeb crawling and scraping API for AI agents
Key IntegrationsTerraform, AWS/GCP Marketplace, PgBouncer, MCP server, CLILangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, S3, GCS, Supabase
Target AudienceHigh-traffic applications needing horizontal scaling (SaaS, e-commerce)AI/ML engineers building RAG pipelines and agentic workflows
Latest NewsPostgres support in web console; Terraform for backups; MCP server for high CPU debugBrowser AI commands; Scraper catalog (1,000+ examples); Data connectors to S3/GCS/Sheets
Not ForSmall projects under 10GB; teams without DBA expertise; on-premises deploymentsExtensive global residential proxy needs; aggressive anti-bot sites; fixed subscription preference

PlanetScale and Spider Cloud solve completely different problems. Choose PlanetScale if you need a high-scale, branch-per-environment database for MySQL/Postgres workloads with horizontal sharding. Choose Spider Cloud if you need a fast, reliable web scraping API optimized for AI agents and RAG. They complement rather than compete.

Try PlanetScaleTry Spider Cloud
PlanetScale
PlanetScale

Managed cloud Postgres & Vitess with NVMe-backed unlimited IOPS and branch-per-environment schema workflows.

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Spider Cloud
Spider Cloud

AI web scraping API: crawl, scrape, search any site into markdown or JSON at 10k req/min.

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Pricing
Freemium
Freemium
Plans
$0/mo
$5/mo
$15/mo
$50/mo starting
Custom
Custom
$1/GB + $0.001/min compute
$40/mo (2 concurrency)
$6/mo
Popularity
14 views
7.5k views
Skill Level
Intermediate
Intermediate
API Available
Platforms
WebCLIAPI
WebAPICLI
Categories
⚙️ Developer Infrastructure
🌐 Web Scraping & Search APIs🖱️ Browser & Computer-Use Agents
Features
MySQL-compatible Vitess with horizontal sharding
Postgres with unlimited IOPS via NVMe drives
Branch-per-environment with per-millisecond pricing
Deploy requests with parallel lanes and throttling from CLI
Online schema changes with revert and zero data loss
Automated failover across 3 availability zones
Connection pooling via PgBouncer (port 6432)
Read replicas for scaling queries
Automated backups with configurable policies
Massively parallel Postgres backups for petabyte-scale
Database Traffic Control with per-tag query budgets
Query Insights with request size metrics and tags
pscale CLI for managing VTGates, IP restrictions, and deploy requests
Terraform provider for Vitess keyspaces and PgBouncers
MCP server to query database insights from AI assistants
Scrape any website into markdown, JSON, or raw HTML
Full-site crawling at 100K+ pages/sec
10,000 core API requests per minute default
Web Search API: SERP + scraping + extraction in one call
/ai/search endpoint with relevance gate to skip irrelevant pages
Silk AI model: HTML-to-structured data and captcha solving on GPUs
Browser Cloud: full browser sessions over CDP
AI commands (Act, Extract, Observe) via WebSocket with AI Studio
Multiple output formats: HTML, raw, plain text, markdown, JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML
Stealth browser layer and Unblocker for anti-bot sites
Proxy pool with 215M+ residential and ISP IPs across 199+ countries
Robots.txt compliance on by default, disable per-request
data_connectors parameter: pipe results to S3, GCS, Google Sheets, Azure Blob, Supabase
extraction_schema parameter: AI output conforms to JSON schema
1,000+ ready-made scraper examples across 32 categories
Integrations
Terraform
PgBouncer
AWS Marketplace
GCP Marketplace
GitHub Actions
Stripe
Cloudflare
MCP
LangChain
LlamaIndex
CrewAI
FlowiseAI
AutoGen
Agno

What real users say: PlanetScale vs Spider Cloud

Not marketing copy and not our opinion — a structured sweep of public discussion (reviews, forums, communities and video comments), showing what people praise and what they complain about for each tool.

PlanetScale

86 mentions across 5 sources · 63% positive — mixed

Hacker News, YouTube, Product Hunt, Bluesky, Lemmy

What users praise

  • • Blazing NVMe drives with unlimited IOPS for high-performance workloads.
  • • Vitess horizontal sharding scales writes seamlessly for massive databases.
  • • Branch-per-environment enables safe, revertable schema changes.
  • • Automated failover across three availability zones for high availability.

What frustrates them

  • • Vendor lock-in makes migration away from Vitess difficult.
  • • DeWitt clause historically discouraged independent benchmarking.
  • • Postgres feature set still lags behind MySQL/Vitess sharding.
  • • Complexity of sharding and VSchema management can be overwhelming.

Researched Jul 26, 2026

Spider Cloud

41 mentions across 2 sources · 0% positive — critical

YouTube, Lemmy

What users praise

  • • Competitive pay-as-you-go pricing at $1/GB with no expiry.
  • • Default rate limit of 10,000 requests per minute is generous.
  • • Broad output formats (HTML, markdown, JSON, CSV) cover diverse needs.
  • • Integrated Web Search API bundles SERP and extraction for AI agents.

What frustrates them

  • • No community feedback to confirm reliability or performance.
  • • Self-reported metrics lack independent verification.
  • • Stealth browser success may vary across real sites.
  • • Potential legal risks from scraping; compliance is user's responsibility.

Researched Aug 26, 2026

Who should pick which

  • SaaS startup needing scalable MySQL
    Pick: PlanetScale

    PlanetScale offers Vitess horizontal sharding and branch-per-environment, ideal for fast-growing apps with high traffic and zero-downtime schema changes.

  • AI agent developer needing web data
    Pick: Spider Cloud

    Spider Cloud's Rust engine, Browser AI commands, and integrations with LangChain/CrewAI make it perfect for feeding real-time web content to LLMs.

  • Enterprise with Postgres need for unlimited IOPS
    Pick: PlanetScale

    PlanetScale's NVMe-backed Postgres provides unlimited IOPS and ultra-low latency, benchmarked as fastest cloud Postgres.

  • Data pipeline engineer scraping at scale
    Pick: Spider Cloud

    Spider Cloud's low cost per page, data connectors to S3/GCS/Sheets, and 99.9% success rate suit high-volume scraping with structured output.

  • Team migrating from Amazon Aurora
    Pick: PlanetScale

    PlanetScale is designed as a drop-in replacement for Aurora with cost reduction and latency improvement, plus Terraform support for migration.

Frequently Asked Questions

PlanetScale vs Spider Cloud: which should you choose?

PlanetScale and Spider Cloud solve completely different problems. Choose PlanetScale if you need a high-scale, branch-per-environment database for MySQL/Postgres workloads with horizontal sharding. Choose Spider Cloud if you need a fast, reliable web scraping API optimized for AI agents and RAG. They complement rather than compete.

Can PlanetScale be used for web scraping?

No, PlanetScale is a database platform, not a scraping tool. Use Spider Cloud for web scraping.

Does Spider Cloud store crawled data?

Spider Cloud provides structured output but does not store data long-term; it can pipe results to S3, GCS, or Supabase via data connectors.

Which tool is better for AI RAG pipelines?

Spider Cloud is specifically designed for web data extraction for RAG, with integrations to LangChain, LlamaIndex, and more.

Does PlanetScale support horizontal sharding for Postgres?

PlanetScale offers Vitess for MySQL sharding; Postgres sharding is handled via Neki (mentioned in description), but primarily MySQL sharding is mature.

Does Spider Cloud have a free tier?

Yes, Spider Cloud offers a free tier of 500 pages per month with pay-as-you-go beyond that.

Can PlanetScale be self-hosted?

No, PlanetScale is cloud-only; it does not offer on-premises deployment.

Does Spider Cloud handle CAPTCHAs?

Yes, Spider Cloud's Silk AI model includes captcha solving capabilities, and the Browser Cloud provides stealth anti-detection.

What is the key differentiator between PlanetScale and Spider Cloud?

One is a database (PlanetScale), the other is a web scraping API (Spider Cloud). They serve different stages of data management – storage vs. acquisition.

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Explore each tool further

PlanetScale
View PlanetScale reviewPlanetScale alternatives
Spider Cloud
View Spider Cloud reviewSpider Cloud alternatives

Browse these categories

Best AI Developer Infrastructure toolsBest AI Web Scraping & Search APIs toolsBest AI Browser & Computer-Use Agents tools
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Last reviewed: June 1, 2026