Supabase vs Firebase
The feature lists match almost line for line. The difference is what you own when you want to leave. Both prices were read from their own pricing pages on 28 August 2026.
Which should you pick?
The feature lists match almost line for line, which is why this usually gets decided on the wrong thing. Both give you a database, authentication, file storage and serverless functions in one project. What separates them is what you own at the end. Supabase is Postgres: the data sits in tables, the queries are SQL, and leaving means a dump file and an afternoon. Firebase is Firestore, a proprietary document store with no joins, and leaving means rewriting every query in the application. Firebase earns its place on mobile, where the offline sync is genuinely better than anything else and rebuilding it yourself costs months. It also bills usage with no cap turned on by default, so a loop in the wrong place produces the kind of invoice people post screenshots of. Supabase pauses free projects after a week idle, and its $25 plan is a floor rather than a price once compute is added. Pick Firebase for a mobile app that has to work offline. Pick Supabase for nearly everything else, by a wider margin the longer you expect to be running.
Supabase and Firebase, side by side
| Supabase | Firebase | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, then $25/mo | Free, then pay per use |
| Free tier | Free plan: 500 MB database, 5 GB egress, 50,000 monthly active users, 2 projects. Projects pause after a week idle. | Spark plan is free forever: 1 GiB Firestore storage, 50K document reads and 20K writes a day, 50K auth users, 10 GB hosting. |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| Plans | 3 | 2 |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| Engine | Postgres | Firestore (document) and Realtime Database |
| Free tier | 500 MB, 50K monthly active users | 1 GiB, 50K reads a day |
| Self-host | Yes, the whole stack | No |
| Auth and storage built in | Yes | Yes |
| Scales to zero | Free plan pauses; paid plans stay warm | Yes |
| Portability | Standard Postgres, dump and go | Proprietary, expect a rewrite to leave |
Rows where both are the same are dimmed, so what is left is the actual difference.
What Supabase is good at
- Standard Postgres, so leaving is a pg_dump rather than a rewrite
- Auth, file storage, realtime and edge functions in the same project
- Genuinely open source, dashboard included, so self-hosting is a real option
Where it falls short
- Free projects pause after a week of inactivity, which catches out side projects
- Compute is billed on top of the $25 fee once you outgrow the $10 credit, so Pro is a floor and not a price
- Nothing between Pro at $25 and Team at $599
What Firebase is good at
- Offline sync and realtime on mobile are still the best in this list
- Auth, push, crash reporting and analytics come with it, in one console
- The free tier never expires and needs no card
Where it falls short
- Firestore is a proprietary document store, so leaving Firebase means rewriting your data layer, not exporting it
- Blaze bills usage with no cap turned on by default, so a runaway loop becomes a very large invoice
- No joins and awkward aggregation: queries that are one line of SQL become application code
Neither of these? All 12 databases tools, compared on what they actually cost.