Comparison

Stolon and Neon

Both give a Postgres client an instant branch. A Neon branch gets its own compute; a Stolon branch merges back.

As of 26 September 2026.

	Neon	Stolon
What it is	open-source serverless Postgres; storage separated from compute (Apache-2.0)	a Postgres-compatible database; closed source
A branch	a copy-on-write clone of the parent's data; each branch has dedicated compute	`CREATE DATABASE b`: instant at any size; the database name selects it
Merging a branch back	Neon's branching overview describes reset-from-parent and restore; it does not describe merging a branch's data into its parent	`MERGE DATABASE b INTO main`, with conflicts named `table[pk].column` and a `DRY RUN` preview
Going back in time	instant restore within the history window: 6 hours on Free (1 GB limit), up to 7 days on Launch, up to 30 on Scale	`FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF` on any table and branch, and restore a branch to a moment
Branch price	10 branches per project included on Free and Launch, 25 on Scale; then $1.50 per branch-month, prorated hourly	no per-branch fee on paid plans
Compute	$0.106 per CU-hour on Launch, $0.222 on Scale; Free includes 100 CU-hours per project; scales to zero after 5 minutes idle on Free and Launch	no per-branch compute
Storage	$0.35 per GB-month on Launch and Scale; 0.5 GB per project on Free; instant-restore history $0.20 per GB-month	free in preview; prices published at launch
Postgres surface	PostgreSQL itself, including extensions	Postgres-compatible, with pgvector and the common extensions (check your queries)

When each fits

Neon if you want each branch to be a Postgres instance with its own compute.
Stolon if you want a branch per agent, test or pull request, with changes coming back to main as a reviewed merge.

neon.com/pricing: plans, branch, compute, storage and restore prices
neon.com/docs/introduction/branching: what a branch is, reset from parent, instant restore
github.com/neondatabase/neon: description and license
Stolon: docs