Supabase

Supabase is an open-source Firebase alternative built on real PostgreSQL. Instead of a proprietary NoSQL database, you get a fully capable Postgres instance, and Supabase layers a complete backend platform on top: user authentication, auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs, file storage, edge functions, realtime subscriptions, and a web-based database management dashboard.

The Postgres foundation is the meaningful distinction from Firebase. You write real SQL. You use joins, transactions, extensions like PostGIS or pgvector, and standard database migration tools. Your data is not locked into a proprietary model, and your queries can take full advantage of everything a mature relational database provides.

Row Level Security lets you define access policies directly in the database. A logged-in user can only read rows that belong to them, without that logic living in application code or an API layer. This is the feature that makes it safe to expose the auto-generated API directly to a frontend without building a custom backend server in between.

The self-hosted path uses a multi-service Docker Compose stack — Postgres, PostgREST, Kong, GoTrue for auth, and several others. It is more involved than most single-container tools, and the self-hosted release sometimes trails the cloud platform on new features. For projects where data sovereignty or cost control matters, the trade-off is worth it. For a quick prototype, the free cloud tier removes the setup friction entirely.

With 103,000 GitHub stars and production use at Mozilla and GitHub, the project’s staying power is not in question.