Your data foundation
for production AI.

Everything your apps and AI agents need from data, unified and managed across any cloud. Always open source, so you're never locked in.

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Aiven is the data cloud for builders

Most data infrastructure was built for analysts looking backward. Aiven is built for the people building what's next - real apps and real agents, in production.

Never get locked in

Genuine open source on open standards and formats. Your data, apps and teams stay portable - you could leave anytime, which is why you won't need to.

The right tool, none of the ops

The best tool for each workload, with patching, scaling, security and uptime handled. Ship instead of maintaining.

Run where it makes sense

One control plane across AWS, GCP, Azure and BYOC. Choose by cost, latency, and residency, not where a vendor requires.

Agent ready

Data, governance, agent access and runtime in one open architecture, so agents can find, trust, reach and act on your data.

Explore Aiven’s pricing plans

The Aiven Free Tier gives you always-on Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and OpenSearch on the same infrastructure as our paid plans. Build, learn, prototype - no credit card, no time limit.

Frequently asked questions

Aiven is an open source data platform company founded in 2016 in Helsinki, Finland, by Oskari Saarenmaa, Hannu Valtonen, Heikki Nousiainen, and Mika Eloranta. Today, Aiven has over 400 employees across offices in Helsinki, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Singapore, Sydney, Auckland, Austin, and Toronto. The company is privately held and backed by investors including IVP, Atomico, Earlybird, Eurazeo, Salesforce Ventures, and World Innovation Lab.

Aiven's mission is to free engineering teams from the operational burden of running open source data infrastructure, so they can focus on building data and AI products. Thousands of companies, including global enterprises like Priceline, Decathlon, Wolt, Sophos, and Fiverr, run their data infrastructure on Aiven.

Aiven is built for developers and engineering teams who need production-grade open source data infrastructure without the operational overhead. In practice, that spans:

  • Enterprise and regulated industries: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, plus Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) for teams with strict data residency, compliance, or cost requirements.
  • Scale-ups and mid-market teams: High availability, multi-cloud portability, and predictable all-inclusive TCO.
  • Solo developers, students, and side projects: the Free tier (no credit card) and the Developer tier, which gives you always-on managed services sized for development, prototyping, and MVPs on a small, predictable monthly fee. Current per-service prices are on the pricing page.
  • Startups: eligible startups can receive up to $100,000 in Aiven credits for 12 months, plus access to technical experts.

Aiven powers AI, streaming, and analytical workloads across fintech (Dojo, Kroo Bank), retail (Decathlon, La Redoute, StockX), food delivery (Wolt), cybersecurity (Sophos, Claroty), travel (Priceline), and SaaS (WalkMe, Fiverr).

Aiven is an open data platform for production AI. It includes a suite of managed open source data services that lets your team deploy and run databases, streaming pipelines, search engines, and analytics services, without managing the underlying infrastructure. Aiven includes a governance and knowledge layer that gives developers, engineers, and AI agents the context they need to find, understand, and trust their data. The platform also includes a runtime environment where teams can deploy applications and agents alongside Aiven operational data.

Aiven makes it easy to get started. You pick the services you need (PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, DataHub, and others), choose a cloud provider and region, and Aiven has them running in minutes. From that point on, Aiven handles backups, security patches, version upgrades, and scaling automatically. Your developers connect to the service the same way they would to any standard open source tool, because it is one.

Aiven removes the operational layer that usually sits between developers and the data tools they want to use. Instead of provisioning servers, writing config, setting up monitoring, and owning patch cycles, your team gets a production-ready service through one console or API call.

Concretely, the platform helps developers by:

  • Shipping faster. A new PostgreSQL, Kafka, or ClickHouse service is live in under 10 minutes. No tickets, no infra setup, no waiting on a platform team.
  • Staying in the open source world. Every service runs the upstream version with standard drivers, APIs, and clients. Code written against Aiven works against a self-hosted instance, and vice versa. No proprietary SDKs to learn.
  • Removing the on-call load. Production plans provide automated daily backups with point-in-time recovery, zero-downtime version upgrades, automatic security patching, and a 99.99% uptime SLA.
  • Running agents against operational data. Deploy containerized applications and AI agents alongside their Aiven data services. Same network, same governance, no separate infrastructure to stand up.
  • Built-in observability. Grafana dashboards and Prometheus-compatible metrics out of the box, plus integrations with Datadog, New Relic, and others.
  • One workflow across clouds. The same console, API, Terraform provider, and Kubernetes operator work on AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, UpCloud and OVHcloud.
  • Developer-friendly tooling. Free tools like the SQL Optimizer, SQL Syntax Checker, and PostgreSQL Playground help developers build and debug faster.
  • MCP server. Connect AI agents and tools directly to your Aiven services, starting with PostgreSQL and Kafka, with more to come.
  • Predictable pricing. Start with the Developer tier, which gives you always-on managed services sized for development, prototyping, and MVPs on a small, flat monthly fee. Current per-service prices are on the pricing page. Scale up any time.

Proof point: La Redoute's team reported spending up to 90% of their day on maintenance before switching to Aiven. After migrating, they moved 25 databases in a single day and refocused engineers on product work. Read more

Aiven currently supports:

  • Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey (Redis-compatible)
  • Streaming: Apache Kafka
  • Analytics: ClickHouse
  • Search & observability: OpenSearch, Aiven for Metrics, Grafana
  • Governance: Aiven DataHub
  • Agent tooling: Aiven Runtime

Every service runs the upstream open source version, not a proprietary fork. Standard connectors, drivers, and client libraries work out of the box, and you're never locked into Aiven-specific APIs.

Aiven runs on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, UpCloud and OVHcloud, across more than 100 regions worldwide.

You can also run Aiven in your own cloud account using Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC). With BYOC, your data never leaves your environment: Aiven's control plane manages the service, but all compute and storage live in your own AWS, GCP, or Azure account. This is popular with teams that have strict data residency, compliance, or cost requirements.

You can switch cloud providers or regions without changing how your application connects to the service.

The main difference is cloud independence and open source fidelity.

  • vs AWS RDS / Google Cloud SQL / Azure Database: Cloud-native managed databases tie your data layer to one provider's pricing, ecosystem, and roadmap. Aiven runs across all major clouds with the same interface, so you can move workloads between providers without re-architecting your data stack.
  • vs Confluent Cloud: Confluent is built on a Confluent-specific Kafka distribution with proprietary extensions. Aiven runs standard Apache Kafka, the same open source version you'd run yourself, so there are no Confluent-specific APIs to learn or migrate away from.
  • vs Elastic Cloud: Elastic moved Elasticsearch to a non-open-source licence, although they've since dual-licensed some source code under AGPLv3. Aiven runs OpenSearch, which remains under the Apache 2.0 licence. Elastic Cloud is also limited to AWS, GCP, and Azure, whereas Aiven runs on any cloud. If licence compliance or cloud flexibility matters to your organisation, these are meaningful distinctions.

Yes. Aiven runs mission-critical workloads for companies across fintech, retail, cybersecurity, and software, including teams processing hundreds of millions of payment transactions per week and streaming petabytes of data daily.

For production use, Aiven provides:

  • High availability: multi-node clusters with automatic failover.
  • 99.99% uptime SLA on Business and Premium plans.
  • Compliance: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA-compliant infrastructure.
  • Private networking: VPC peering and PrivateLink so traffic never traverses the public internet.
  • Access control: role-based access with audit logs for compliance-sensitive environments.

Proof points: WalkMe handles over 100,000 events per second on Aiven for Apache Kafka. Dojo processes its weekly payment transactions on Aiven. Sophos streams terabytes of security data daily across 9 regions.

You can deploy your first service in under 10 minutes — no infrastructure setup, no configuration files, no cloud account required to start.

  • Free: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Kafka, OpenSearch and Valkey. No credit card required, no time limit. Services may power off after long periods of inactivity.
  • Developer: From $5/month for PostgreSQL & MySQL (dedicated single VM: 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage) as well as OpenSearch, or $35/month for Kafka. Basic support, always-on. Built for side projects, MVPs, and dev environments.
  • Startup: Small production workloads with backup retention and basic high-availability options.
  • Business: Recommended for production. Multi-node clusters with high availability, 14-day backup retention, and the 99.99% uptime SLA.
  • Premium: Enterprise-grade production. Larger cluster sizes, 30-day backup retention, optional synchronous replication, priority support add-ons.

All plans include automated backups, monitoring, and no hidden fees. You bill by the hour for actual usage, and you can upgrade or downgrade between tiers with a one-click change in the Aiven Console.

Exact pricing for every service, plan, and cloud region is at aiven.io/pricing.

STOP MANAGING, START BUILDING