PlanetScale vs Supabase

At a Glance

PlanetScale

Supabase

PlanetScale

Supabase

PlanetScale

Pros

Branching model for database schema changes means you never run a raw ALTER TABLE in production again — a game changer for team workflows+183
Zero-downtime schema migrations are solved by default — no more 3am maintenance windows for adding a column+162
Vitess under the hood means it handles enormous write throughput that would kill a vanilla Postgres setup+147
The query insights dashboard identifies slow queries with execution plans before they become production incidents+109

Cons

They killed the free tier in 2024 and the cheapest plan is $39/mo — hard to justify for early-stage projects that might not survive

Database

Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale

Database

PlanetScale vs Neon

Database

Supabase vs Neon vs PlanetScale

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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