The Case for Supabase

Supabase is an open-source mobile and web app development platform built on PostgreSQL, an open-source database management system.

It launched in 2020 and has quickly gained traction with makers seeking an open-source alternative to Firebase, the closed-source, Google-owned platform that’s dominated the backend-as-a-service (BaaS) market for the past decade.

Product Hunt users love Supabase; it’s currently the #5 most shouted-out tool by top makers on the site. Given the platform’s prominence in the modern developer’s toolbox, we thought it would be helpful to get a bit more granular about why people love Supabase so much. Why choose Supabase over another BaaS tool? What’s to like (or not to like) about it?

So, we sent out a survey to top makers who shouted-out the platform and asked them to say a bit more. Consider this article the first in a series of product explorations intended to help the community understand how and why developers choose to use the tools they do.

“We used Supabase for our database and real-time functionality, specifically to enable live streaming data updates to our data table in Manaflow. This setup allows us to handle dynamic data effectively and keeps our users up-to-date with the latest insights without needing to reload or refresh.” — Ka Ling Wu, CEO and Co-founder of Upsolve AI, which provides customer-facing analytics as a service.

“We specifically chose Supabase to use their edge functions and scalable infrastructure as part of Not Diamond’s workflows for authentication and organization management.” — Alejandro Companioni, Founding Engineer at Not Diamond (#1 Product of the Day), a chatbot service with automatic model routing.

“[Supabase] is our database, user management, permissions system, real-time notification system, and more. It’s unique because it creates a new paradigm where your database is your backend. So instead of having client -> backend -> database, you can now do client -> database, which opens up some really powerful use cases. In Ouro’s case, it allows us to make our whole platform easily accessible from any environment. We have our web interface, but we also allow users to create an API which they can then use to interact with our programming and scripting environments…[and] the RLS [row-level security] built into the user management and auth was also extremely helpful. I’ve built countless web apps, but it’s never been this easy to manage permissions and access to resources as it is with Supabase.” — Matt Moderwell, Founder of Ouro, a collaborative monetization platform for technical creators.

“I use it for auth and user management. Also, I started the project with their Next.js template that’s become my go-to for building projects.” — Nicolás Montone, Founder of Chat With Your Database, an AI tool that lets you query your Postgres database.

“I considered using Vercel Blob or [Amazon Simple Storage Service — S3] for my storage, but I liked how Supabase does it all and the pricing is super competitive. I also loved being able to run the local Supabase instance in Docker.” — Jonny Miles, Founder of Piclooks Avatars (#4 Product of the Day), which makes free AI-generated profile pictures for your designs.

“We considered using Postgres, but we decided to use Supabase because it was extremely easy to get started with and included real-time streaming, safe migrations, branching, and authorization out of the box. Each of these features alone would've taken us days to build, and were key to helping us iterate quickly over the essential early days of our company.” — Wilson Spearman, CEO and Co-Founder of Parity, an AI site-reliability engineering tool.

“We chose Supabase over competitors like Firebase and AWS primarily due to its excellent mix of functionality and open-source nature, which helps prevent vendor lock-in. Supabase is easy to set up locally for testing, providing a smooth development process. Additionally, it offers a great developer experience with PostgreSQL under the hood, ensuring stability and good scalability for our application.” — Knut Sveidqvist, CTO of Mermaid Chart, a visual collaboration platform powered by the Mermaid open-source project.

“Supabase quickly caught our attention as an affordable and highly versatile solution. While Firebase was an option, our project required a relational database capable of handling complex joins, making PostgreSQL — and therefore Supabase — the clear choice. Right from the start, we found the admin dashboard intuitive and easy to work with, and both the Supabase community and internal support have been a huge plus.” — Team at Fixtured (#4 Product of the Day), a comprehensive sports calendar that covers over 50 competitions across major sports leagues.

“For three reasons. First, it is cheaper than Firebase. I did not want to get stuck in an ecosystem with ever-changing prices, policies, etc. Second, it is open-source. My experiences in publishing software started in open-source (see GWSL), so I am a strong believer in supporting projects like these. Finally, Supabase felt like the future. I found it about one year before “public launch” and although I was intimidated at first, the frequent updates and rapid improvements made it not only viable, but also exciting and fun.” — Paul, Founder of Time Squeeze, an app that lets you track, second-by-second, your computer activity.

“We considered Planetscale and Turso as alternatives, but ultimately we opted for Supabase because we needed a standard PostgreSQL database. Supabase’s native Postgres setup aligned well with our data needs, and we felt it offered more flexibility and compatibility for our use case.” — Lawrence Chen, Co-founder of Manaflow, a tool for automating repetitive office work using natural language.

“The UI is amazing and fast. I like how I can create a project and get my Postgres URL in minutes without needing to set up an RDS instance.” — Gustavo Fior, Software Engineer at Censorfy, which lets you moderate content with HTTP requests.

“I liked Supabase’s seamless integration of PostgreSQL, built-in authentication, real-time updates and robust row-level security.” — Yassine Derkaoui, Founder of Vibeo (#3 Product of the Day), which lets you collect and create customer video testimonials.

“The fact that I can run it locally on my machine for development is lovely. Its type generation for TS is also wonderful and has made my development process much more efficient.” — Jason Smiles, Founder of Unin, a talent search engine powered by your resume.

“I really like the UI: the easy table editor/viewer, and the AI query generator. I use them multiple times a day, makes small DB updates a breeze. Also, things like increasing disk size or getting extra compute are super easy.” — Nick Bradford, Co-Founder/CTO of Ellipsis (#4 Product of the Day), an AI code reviewer that squashes bugs with one click fixes.

“1. The way it integrates with a bunch of tools, my favorites being Resend, Vercel, and Trigger.dev. 2. I really appreciate the option for self-hosting. 3. The documentation is solid and helpful.” — Ritik Sharma, Founder of LoveTunesAI, which provides personalized songs for your loved ones.

“We love the intuitive operation of Supabase and the super clear backend. The speed and extensive feature list round off the experience perfectly.” — Ricardo Köhne, Founder/Developer of Marble Booking, an intuitive online booking management platform.

“The ease of use. I use the UI to do database migrations, run queries, explore our tables, and so much more.” — Hunter Brooks, Co-Founder and CEO of Ellipsis (#4 Product of the Day).

“It could enhance its real-time scalability and performance for high-traffic applications. Our platform is collaboration-heavy, and as we scale real-time updates can become resource-intensive, especially with complex relational data.” — Kazim Mohammed, Founder of Dezyn, a tool for transforming cloud architecture diagrams and flowcharts into interactive, clickable components.

“By providing a GCP cloud option rather than just AWS.” — Bino Thomas, Founder of Fill-A-Form AI (#2 Product of the Day), an intelligent autofill assistant that fills out forms in one click using your data and knowledge base.

“Stronger and more direct management and geo-location, especially for products that tend to have to serve a geographically distributed audience.” — George, Co-Founder of Supafit (#4 Product of the Day), an AI personal training and fitness tracking app.

“Supabase’s reliability/uptime has improved considerably, but still isn't ideal for production apps considering there isn't an easy way to have service-independent redundancy.” — Rohan Sood, Co-Founder/CEO of Patched, an open-source workflow automation tool for dev teams.

“The documentation could be more beginner-friendly, as this would greatly help newcomers quickly get up to speed.” — Amit Tambulkar, Founder of BuildnPlay, a tool that gamifies building in public with streaks, levels and points.

“The dashboard could use some optimizing because sometimes the load times are too long.” — Ricjohn, Founder of Ghostedd, a platform that lets you report companies that ghosted your job application.

“Indie hackers, folks starting out, and people who are new to Postgres yet appreciate its beauty.” — Rohan Rajpal, Co-Founder of Tevy, an app that directly connects influencers’ Instagram posts to your Shopify products for comment automation and accurate tracking.

“People who like Serverless and are new to accessing data.” — Baron Ha, Founder of Binsoo, an iOS photo editing app with built-in filters and tools.

“Startup founders looking to build quickly without spending a lot.” — Rohan, CEO/Founder of Cheat Layer (#1 Product of the Day), which builds end-to-end automations in simple language.