Almost every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler like PgBouncer, according to a survey of major providers including AWS RDS, Azure, Google Cloud SQL, Supabase, Neon, DigitalOcean, and others. Only IBM Cloud and Oracle OCI lack a managed pooling option, and both are dismissed as unlikely choices outside enterprise sales cycles. The piece argues connection pooling is effectively a mandatory add-on because Postgres itself handles many connections poorly, and contrasts this with MySQL and MongoDB, which don't require a bolted-on pooler. The wasted effort of every provider building homegrown pooling setups and every user having to learn PgBouncer's quirks (like the lack of LISTEN/NOTIFY support) is framed as evidence that native connection pooling in Postgres itself would be a high-impact improvement.
Questions this post answers
Which managed Postgres providers include a connection pooler like PgBouncer by default?
Nearly all major managed Postgres providers bundle a pooler. Aiven, Alibaba RDS, Azure PG, Crunchy Bridge, DigitalOcean, EDB Postgres AI, Fly.io MPG, Google Cloud SQL, Heroku, Neon, PlanetScale, Railway, Render, Supabase, and Tiger Cloud all ship PgBouncer or an equivalent (AWS uses RDS Proxy, Supabase offers Supavisor). Only IBM Cloud and Oracle OCI lack a managed pooling option. Comparing managed Postgres providers before committing to one is easier with sources tracked on daily.dev.
Why do I need PgBouncer if I'm already using managed Postgres?
Postgres itself struggles with managing large numbers of connections, so a pooler like PgBouncer is used to add local connection pools and short-term checkouts and keep production stable. This has remained true for roughly a decade, and it's why nearly every managed Postgres provider bundles a pooler by default rather than leaving users to set one up themselves. Developers debugging connection limits on Postgres can keep up with pooling gotchas via daily.dev.
272.4K Impressions9 Comments