Supabase vs Firebase

Compare open source Postgres flexibility against Google's integrated backend stack.

Firebase

Google's app development platform with realtime database

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Supabase

The open source Firebase alternative with Postgres

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Our take

Pick Supabase when you want a real SQL database you can query directly, own your schema, and keep the door open to self-hosting. Pick Firebase when your app is mostly mobile, real-time sync matters more than relational modeling, and you're already deep in the Google ecosystem.

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At a Glance

Attribute	Firebase	Supabase
Category	Database	Database
Pricing Model	freemium	freemium
Starting Price	Free	Free / $25/mo
Free Tier	Yes	Yes
Open Source	No	Yes
Platforms	web, iOS, Android	web, postgres, edge

Community Popularity

Firebase

Supabase

Key Features

Firebase

authentication
Firestore
hosting
cloud functions
storage
messaging
AI Logic

Supabase

database

Pros & Cons

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

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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

Supabase

Pros

Postgres under the hood means you can use any standard SQL tool and your existing knowledge transfers directly+187
The free tier is genuinely generous — 500MB database and 2GB storage is enough to validate most SaaS ideas without spending a cent+164
Row-level security policies are built in, so you can ship a secure multi-tenant app without writing custom auth middleware+142
Auto-generated TypeScript types from your schema save hours every week and eliminate an entire class of runtime bugs+138
Storage, auth, edge functions, and database all in one dashboard — I stopped juggling six different services+121
The realtime subscriptions work out of the box and don't require any extra infrastructure like a separate Pusher account+97

Cons

Hitting the connection limit on the free tier (60 connections) will silently fail your app at the worst possible moment under load+178
Self-hosting is technically possible but the documentation is scattered and keeping up with upstream changes is a maintenance burden+112
Edge functions have a cold start delay that makes them unsuitable for latency-sensitive operations without warm-up tricks+98
The dashboard UI has had confusing UX regressions after updates that made simple tasks like inspecting RLS policies harder to find+89
Branching for database preview environments is still immature compared to Neon — you can't easily spin up a branch per PR+74

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