Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale

Three managed-database tradeoffs: Postgres (Supabase), document NoSQL (Firebase), and serverless MySQL (PlanetScale).

Supabase

The open source Firebase alternative with Postgres

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Firebase

Google's app development platform with realtime database

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PlanetScale

The world's most advanced serverless MySQL platform

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Our take

Choose Supabase if you want Postgres with batteries — auth, storage, edge functions — and the option to self-host later. Choose Firebase when real-time sync and mobile SDKs matter more than relational integrity. Choose PlanetScale when you're committed to MySQL, expect heavy write traffic, and value their developer-experience around schema changes.

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At a Glance

Attribute	Supabase	Firebase	PlanetScale
Category	Database	Database	Database
Pricing Model	freemium	freemium	paid
Starting Price	Free / $25/mo	Free	$39/mo
Free Tier	Yes	Yes	No
Open Source	Yes	No	No
Platforms	web, postgres, edge	web, iOS, Android	web, api

Community Popularity

Supabase

Firebase

PlanetScale

Key Features

Supabase

database
authentication
storage
realtime
edge functions

Firebase

authentication
Firestore
hosting

Pros & Cons

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

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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

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

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

See full review of Firebase→

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+198
It's MySQL not Postgres, which cuts you off from a huge ecosystem of Postgres-native tools, extensions, and hiring pool+176
Foreign key constraints aren't supported because of the sharding model — you have to enforce referential integrity in application code+152
Prisma support works but you lose some ORM features due to the missing FK support, and you'll hit confusing errors if you're not aware+91

See full review of PlanetScale→

Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale

At a Glance

Community Popularity

Key Features

Pros & Cons

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