About Nile
Nile is a Postgres platform designed for B2B software, where every customer is a tenant such as a company, organization or workspace. It separates storage from compute, virtualizes tenants, and supports vertical and horizontal scaling so developers can build multi-tenant products without designing tenant isolation themselves.
Components include Postgres re-engineered for multi-tenant apps, tenant virtualization, Nile Auth for drop-in B2B authentication that keeps customer data in your Nile Postgres, and an AI toolkit with a vector database. Features described include unlimited databases and virtual tenant databases, secure isolation of customer data and embeddings, placement of tenants on serverless or provisioned compute globally, and tenant-level branching, backups, schema migration and insights.
The repository is mostly documentation and is licensed under Apache-2.0, and the README says the platform is in public preview. You can sign up for the hosted console or try it locally with a Docker image. It suits SaaS developers who want multi-tenant data separation and vector search built into their database layer.
Key features
- Postgres designed for multi-tenant apps
- Tenant virtualization and isolation
- Nile Auth for B2B authentication
- Vector database and AI toolkit
- Tenant-level backups and branching
- Docker image for local use
Good fit for
- →Building a B2B SaaS with per-customer isolation
- →Storing customer-specific vector embeddings
- →Adding multi-tenant auth without custom code
- Tags
- postgresql
- multi-tenant
- saas
- database
- vector-database
- authentication
- b2b
- serverless
Nile: questions and answers
- What is Nile used for?
- Nile is a PostgreSQL platform re-engineered for multi-tenant B2B apps, with tenant virtualization, drop-in auth and a vector database for AI features. It is a good fit for building a B2B SaaS with per-customer isolation, storing customer-specific vector embeddings and adding multi-tenant auth without custom code.
- Is Nile open source?
- Yes. Nile is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at niledatabase/niledatabase.
- Is Nile free?
- Yes. Nile is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available, with paid plans from $15 per month.
- Can I self-host Nile?
- Yes. Nile can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What are some alternatives to Nile?
- Similar open-source tools in the Databases category include Citus, Neon and SpacetimeDB. SaaS products in the same category include Amazon Aurora, Cloudflare D1 and EDB Postgres AI.
- Is Nile actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Nile was on 10 September 2026. The project has 1.1k stars on GitHub.
Open-source alternatives to Nile
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Citus
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SaaS alternatives to Nile
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Amazon Aurora
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AWS cloud-built relational database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL
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Cloudflare D1
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Serverless SQLite-based database for Cloudflare Workers
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KX kdb+
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Momento
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Serverless cache and pub/sub service with no infrastructure to manage
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