Neon for Development and Testing

Boost developer productivity with Neon—a flexible development sandbox for running non-production workloads.

What sets Neon apart from other Postgres providers, beyond its true serverless nature, is its focus on delivering an exceptional developer experience.

Here are some of our standout features:

Standout features

Together, these features create a fast, flexible, and developer-friendly database experience that traditional solutions can’t match.

Serverless Architecture with Autoscaling: Neon automatically scales resources to match workload demand, with no manual intervention required.
Branching for Development and Testing: Neon enables instant branching that creates isolated copies of data and schema. This allows for safe development and testing without impacting production.
Integration and Compatibility: Neon supports all the latest PostgreSQL versions and numerous extensions, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of applications and frameworks.
Provisioning Environments: Neon simplifies the provisioning and management of environments through its console or API. New databases and branches can be spun up instantly, resources can be managed, and settings configured—either through a user-friendly console or automated API calls.

Move non-production to Neon

Not every team is ready for a full database migration. However, even if teams aren’t ready to migrate their production databases, they can still improve efficiency by moving their non-production workloads to Neon using a Neon Twin.

Create a Neon Twin

A Neon Twin is a full or partial clone of your production or staging database, providing developers and teams with isolated, sandboxed environments that closely mirror production.

Learn how to create a Twin here.

Workflows

Most teams running dev/test workloads on Neon while keeping production on another Postgres platform implement a workflow similar to this:

Set up a Neon Project for dev/test environments

Teams start by creating a single Neon project to host multiple dev/test environments.
Create a Neon Twin

Next, teams create a Neon Twin —a full or partial clone of their production or staging database that remains automatically synchronized.
Develop on branches

Once a Neon Twin is set up, teams can instantly create branches. These branches are fully isolated and provide teams with a complete copy of the testing dataset immediately.
Migrate changes Migrate changes developed and tested on a Twin back to your production or staging database using your existing workflows.

Let's Connect

We’re happy to give you a hand with any technical questions about how to set this workflow up. We can also discuss pricing options, annual contracts, and provide migration assistance.