# Neki

18 Hacker News commenters recommended Neki and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 4 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it because it comes from the team behind Vitess and PlanetScale and aims to bring sharding to Postgres. The most common caveat is that it is closed source, and some note that sharding is not yet implemented.

## Why people recommend it

- Built by Vitess and PlanetScale team (2 comments): "built by the guy who created Vitess and cofounded PlanetScale, so while it doesn't have sharding implemented at the moment I think it would be foolish to discount it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647957)) "Neki looks like a good product, and I trust that something coming from the folks behind Vitess is going to be a damn fine offering" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662763))
- Adds sharding to Postgres (2 comments): "Obviously welcome more tools for Postgres and sharding but it’s a tough hill to climb against the hyper clouds." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647015)) "it works and does sharding" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648429))
- Scales from small to petabytes (2 comments): "It's why Neki and Vitess are so powerful for everything from small 1GB databases to petabytes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160316)) "eventually Neki, these can scale out horizontally" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506310))

## What people warn about

- Closed source, not open source (5 comments): "Sad to see this coming from a company that was itself built on the foundation of an open-source project like Vitess." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649469)) "now planetscale have made a Vitess like equivalent for Postgres which they have made proprietary" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650933)) "A year ago in the initial announcement post you explicitly mentioned open sourcing it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649209))
- Weak marketing, reads like AI (2 comments): "Folks, your blog post sucks at marketing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647639)) "The intro pages just read as AI slop." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649395))
- Unclear purpose and benchmark (2 comments): "What's the point of this "benchmark"?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49663029)) "I have still no idea what is this." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655041))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Amazon RDS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-rds.md): 50 recommend
- [Neon Postgres](https://hackerapproved.com/p/neon.md): 48 recommend
- [DynamoDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-dynamodb.md): 46 recommend
- [Cloudflare D1](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-d1.md): 36 recommend
- [PlanetScale](https://hackerapproved.com/p/planetscale.md): 33 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://planetscale.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Neki", https://hackerapproved.com/p/neki/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).