Supabase? The open-source Firebase alternative?!
This is an Extra Ordinary Claim because it requires Extra Ordinary Evidence
"Supabase VS Firebase"
Supabase VS Firebase
1. Features
| Supabase | Firebase |
|---|---|
| Database | Database |
| Authentication | Authentication |
| Storage | Storage |
| Functions | Functions |
| Hosting | |
| Analytics | |
| Crashlytics | |
| ML | |
| Push notifications | |
| Remote config |
This isn't completely a fair comparison because Supabase is still new, but Firebase has been here for a long time!
There is one great fact which is about Supabase. What's it?
Supabase uses open-source technologies for it's platform, what does it mean?
It means that you can run Supabase with Docker, and you can host your own Firebase alternative on AWS (recommended) or any other cloud platform.
2. Policies
When you use Firebase, you are locked in with Google, as you are signing a contract with the Alphabet cooperation by giving them the power to destroy your business at any moment if they decide that's what should happen. Proof as in the following picture:
Source: Firebase Paid Services Terms of Service
Let's look now to Supabase features to see how they stack-up in front of Firebase...
User Authentication
Before we start, Supabase isn't a 1-to-1 mapping of Firebase. It just provides the tools which approximately do the same thing. I have made a demo using Supabase and I would like to tell you that the developer experience is similar to Firebase. The only thing Supabase is missing is phone authentication. Now, in the actual code, you can get a user logged in with one or two lines of code like Firebase, I do like that Supabase returns an error as an object, because in Firebase you should wrap it in a try catch block to catch errors.
Security
One thing cool that Supabase does but Firebase doesn't is that automatically create a database record for the user.
Database
We haven't talked about database yet. In Firebase we have 2 different database options but we'll be focusing on Firestore which is very similar to MongoDB and it is a NoSQL document database. It is very easy to work with scales automatically and it automatically handles relational data fairly well. However, it's not ideal for graphs and full-text search.
Supabase uses PostgreSQL as it's database, a relational SQL database that has been around forever. But SQL databases are expensive, hard to use, and difficult to scale. Supabase offers you handling the scaling for you automatically and also by providing a dashboard and SDK to make working with the database much easier.
Realtime
If you are building a realtime app, you can do so with one line of code with very little configuration with Firebase. The client-side SDKs are very sophisticated and do thing like optimistic updates where it updates the UI before the actual changes is committed to the back-end. It also supports offline mode.
In Supabase you can subscribe to real time updates that's pretty much it. Another issue that security policies will not work with real time data.
Pricing
Both products has a free tier:
| Supabase | Firebase |
|---|---|
| 10K users | Unlimited users |
| 500 MB data | 1 GB data |
| FREE | FREE |
| Supabase | Firebase |
|---|---|
| $25 per month for 7 | $0.18 per GB |
| Unlimited API calls?! | $0.06 per 100K reads |
| $0.18 per 100K writes |
| Supabase | Firebase |
|---|---|
| $25 per month | $0.18 per GB |
| $0.125 per GB (over 8 GB) |
The end 🎉
Hope the comparison was useful for you! Good bye!