Softwr

Developer Tools · head to head

Ona (formerly Gitpod) vs turbopuffer

Ona (formerly Gitpod) logo

Ona (formerly Gitpod)

Developer Tools

Cloud development environments repositioned as a control plane for software engineering agents

From
Free
Free plan
Yes
Visit Ona (formerly Gitpod)Full review
turbopuffer logo

turbopuffer

Databases

Closed-source vector and full-text search service built directly on object storage, with cold queries measured in seconds rather than milliseconds.

From
$16/month
Free plan
No
Visit turbopufferFull review

The short version

  • Ona (formerly Gitpod) has a free plan, then $20/mo; turbopuffer starts at $16/mo.
  • Only Ona (formerly Gitpod) lists ephemeral environments; only turbopuffer lists object storage architecture.
  • Prices and features on this page were last checked on 13 November 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Ona (formerly Gitpod) and turbopuffer actually diverge.

Attributes where Ona (formerly Gitpod) and turbopuffer differ
AttributeOna (formerly Gitpod)turbopuffer
Starting priceFree$16/month
Pricing modelPer month by compute unitSubscription
Free tierYesNo
PlatformsWeb, Linux, macOS, Windows, AWSWeb
CategoryDeveloper ToolsDatabases

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Ona (formerly Gitpod)

  • Ephemeral environments
  • Agent sessions
  • Bring your own cloud
  • Devcontainer standard
  • Compute unit budgeting
  • Enterprise identity

Only in turbopuffer

  • Object storage architecture
  • Namespaces
  • Vector search
  • Full-text search
  • Attribute filtering
  • Documented limits
  • Configurable consistency
  • Durable writes

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Ona (formerly Gitpod)

  • Giving a large engineering team identical, disposable environments so onboarding is a link rather than a two day setupnot turbopuffer
  • Running several coding agents in parallel against real databases and services instead of on a laptopnot turbopuffer
  • Keeping source code off contractor and offshore laptops by moving the whole environment into a controlled accountnot turbopuffer
  • Reproducing a hard-to-configure toolchain for a short-lived project without polluting anyone machinenot turbopuffer

turbopuffer

  • A product with one search index per customer and thousands of customers, most of whose data is idle on any given daynot Ona (formerly Gitpod)
  • Very large corpora where holding every vector in memory is the dominant cost and occasional cold-query latency is acceptablenot Ona (formerly Gitpod)
  • Hybrid retrieval combining BM25 and vector search where running and synchronising two separate systems is the problem being solvednot Ona (formerly Gitpod)
  • Retrieval for agent and assistant products where indexes are created and destroyed frequently and per-index overhead must be near zeronot Ona (formerly Gitpod)

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Ona (formerly Gitpod)

  • Acquisition risk has already materialised: the company closed a sale to OpenAI on 10 August 2026 and now sits inside the Codex team, so nothing public guarantees pricing, continuity or neutrality between model vendors beyond honouring existing commitments
  • Two disruptive changes of direction inside a year, from development environments to agent orchestration and then from independence to acquisition, mean the product a browser IDE buyer originally chose no longer exists in that form
  • The Gitpod Classic sunset on 15 October 2025 required manual conversion of configuration, hand-moved secrets, self-rescued workspace data and a brand new account, which is the clearest available precedent for how the vendor handles deprecation
  • Community self-hosting is finished: the AGPL-3.0 repository is deprecated by its own README, and self-hosted now means a vendor-operated install in your AWS or GCP account, with no Azure, no on-premises and no air-gapped path
  • Pricing is difficult to model because it runs on a compute unit currency where subscription credits expire at the end of the month, the mapping from units to actual compute is not published on the pricing page, and Enterprise is quotation only

turbopuffer

  • A cold namespace pays object storage latency on the first query, with a documented p90 around 1,214 ms on a million documents, so any interactive search box needs the data kept warm or the user waits about a second
  • Queries are eventually consistent by default, and after roughly 128 MiB of outstanding writes new data is invisible until indexed, which the vendor puts at tens of seconds for small namespaces and tens of minutes for large ones, so a bulk re-index is not immediately queryable
  • It is closed source with no community edition, so single-tenant or bring-your-own-cloud deployment is a commercial negotiation rather than a deployment choice, and there is no path to running it yourself if the relationship ends
  • Per-namespace ceilings, roughly 10,000 writes per second, 32 MB/s and 500 million documents per shard, mean a single enormous index has to be sharded across namespaces by your application rather than by the service
  • It is a search engine, not a database: there are no joins, no cross-document transactions and no SQL, so it sits beside a primary datastore and keeping the two in step is work that belongs to you

Pricing, plan by plan

Ona (formerly Gitpod)

Free
  • FreeFree
    • Up to 3 parallel environments
    • Machines up to 4 vCPU, 16 GB memory and 80 GB disk
    • Ona Cloud multi-tenant only
  • Core$20/mo
    • From 20 US dollars a month, up to 100 team members
    • Includes 80 to 2,200 recurring compute units a month depending on tier
    • Additional units from 10 US dollars per 40 units
  • EnterpriseOn request
    • Single-tenant deployment in your own AWS or GCP account
    • SAML and OIDC single sign-on
    • Dedicated account management and forward deployed engineers

turbopuffer

$16/month
  • Launch$16/mo
    • All database features
    • Multi-tenancy deployment
    • SOC2 & GDPR-ready DPA
  • Scale$256/mo
    • Everything in Launch
    • HIPAA-ready BAA
    • Single Sign-On (SSO)
  • Enterprise$4,096/mo
    • Everything in Scale
    • Single-tenancy & BYOC deployment options
    • Private networking

Which should you pick?

Choose Ona (formerly Gitpod) if

  • You need ephemeral environments.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows, AWS.
  • You also want agent sessions.
Ona (formerly Gitpod) review

Choose turbopuffer if

  • You need object storage architecture.
  • You also want namespaces.
turbopuffer review

Questions people ask

Is Ona (formerly Gitpod) or turbopuffer better?
Neither clearly leads. Ona (formerly Gitpod) starts at Free and turbopuffer at $16/month, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Ona (formerly Gitpod) or turbopuffer?
Ona (formerly Gitpod) has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Ona (formerly Gitpod) and $16/month for turbopuffer.
Does Ona (formerly Gitpod) or turbopuffer run on more platforms?
Ona (formerly Gitpod) runs on Web, Linux, macOS, Windows, AWS. turbopuffer runs on Web.
Can I use Ona (formerly Gitpod) for free?
Yes. Ona (formerly Gitpod) has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. turbopuffer starts at $16/month.
What is Ona (formerly Gitpod) best used for?
Ona (formerly Gitpod) is most often used for giving a large engineering team identical, disposable environments so onboarding is a link rather than a two day setup, running several coding agents in parallel against real databases and services instead of on a laptop, keeping source code off contractor and offshore laptops by moving the whole environment into a controlled account, reproducing a hard-to-configure toolchain for a short-lived project without polluting anyone machine. Of those, giving a large engineering team identical, disposable environments so onboarding is a link rather than a two day setup and running several coding agents in parallel against real databases and services instead of on a laptop are not what turbopuffer is typically brought in for.
What can Ona (formerly Gitpod) do that turbopuffer cannot?
Ona (formerly Gitpod) covers Ephemeral environments, Agent sessions, Bring your own cloud, Devcontainer standard. turbopuffer covers Object storage architecture, Namespaces, Vector search, Full-text search.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Ona (formerly Gitpod): Is Gitpod still called Gitpod?

No. It rebranded to Ona in September 2025, and gitpod.io now redirects to ona.com. The company was acquired by OpenAI in a deal that closed on 10 August 2026.

turbopuffer: Can I self-host turbopuffer?

There is no open source or community edition. Single-tenant and bring-your-own-cloud deployments exist as commercial arrangements, but there is no way to run it independently of the vendor.

Ona (formerly Gitpod): Can I still self-host it for free?

No. The AGPL-3.0 self-hosted project is deprecated by its own README. What is offered now is a vendor-operated single-tenant install in your AWS or GCP account on the Enterprise plan.

turbopuffer: How fast is it really?

Warm queries perform comparably to in-memory search engines. Cold queries, where data is not cached, have a documented p90 around 1,214 ms on a million documents. Write p90 is around 248 ms for a 512 KB upsert because writes go straight to object storage.

Ona (formerly Gitpod): What happened to Gitpod Classic?

Pay-as-you-go Classic was switched off on 15 October 2025. Migration required converting gitpod.yml to devcontainer.json, moving secrets by hand, downloading workspace data before the cutoff and creating a new account.

turbopuffer: Is it consistent?

Eventually consistent by default, with the vendor reporting that over 99.8% of queries return consistent data. Strong consistency can be requested per query at a latency cost. Large write bursts have a longer visibility delay while indexing catches up.

Ona (formerly Gitpod): What does it cost?

Core starts at 20 US dollars a month and includes a monthly allowance of Ona Compute Units, with more from 10 dollars per 40 units. Subscription credits expire monthly. Enterprise is quoted.

turbopuffer: What is it best at?

Large numbers of namespaces where most are idle. The architecture makes cold data cheap to keep, which is exactly the shape of a multi-tenant product with a long tail of inactive customers.

turbopuffer: What are the hard limits?

Up to 128 billion documents and 256 TB per namespace, 500 million documents per shard, 64 MiB per document, 10,752 dense vector dimensions, roughly 10,000 writes per second per namespace and a maximum result set of 10,000.

Share

Related pages

More on Ona (formerly Gitpod)

More on turbopuffer

Keep looking

Other head to heads