Firebase vs Neon

At a Glance

Firebase

Neon

Firebase

Neon

Firebase

Pros

The free Spark plan is surprisingly capable and you can prototype an entire app without a credit card+156
Realtime database sync across clients is dead simple and the SDK handles reconnection and offline state for you+143
Firebase Auth handles phone number verification, Google OAuth, and anonymous users with about 10 lines of code+129
The Emulator Suite lets you run everything locally including Firestore, Auth, and Cloud Functions with full fidelity+108
Google's infrastructure means you get truly global low-latency reads without any configuration+91

Cons

Database

Supabase vs Firebase

Database

Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale

Database

Supabase vs Neon

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Vendor lock-in is severe — the client SDK is so deeply embedded in your app that migrating away took my team two full weeks+199
NoSQL Firestore makes complex queries painful — I rewrote a feature three times trying to avoid needing a proper join+189
Pricing can spike unexpectedly because reads are charged per document, and a single inefficient query can cost dollars instead of cents+176
There's no way to do schema migrations or version your data model, so evolving your data structure over time is a manual nightmare+134
Cloud Functions cold starts on the free tier are often 3-5 seconds, which makes them useless for user-facing request handlers+118

Neon

Pros

Branching lets you create a full database copy in seconds, which finally makes database previews per pull request practical+168
Scale-to-zero means you pay nothing when your app is idle, making it the cheapest option for multiple staging environments+152
It's standard Postgres, so every extension, tool, and migration framework you already know works without modification+139
The connection pooling via pgBouncer is built in, so you don't hit connection limits when using serverless functions+127
Point-in-time restore is available even on paid tiers at a much lower price than managed Postgres alternatives+93

Cons

Scale-to-zero is great for cost but the cold start on a sleeping database adds 500ms-1s of latency to the first request, which can surprise users+145
Some Postgres extensions aren't available yet on Neon because of the storage separation architecture+96
The free tier is limited to a single project and 10 branches, which is tight if you're managing multiple apps+81
The billing dashboard is confusing — compute hour pricing requires math to predict your monthly bill accurately+72