Supabase vs Firebase (2026): Which Is Better for Developers?

For a new web app in 2026, pick Supabase: Pro is $25 a month, and that fee covers one Micro Postgres instance. Pick Firebase for a native iOS or Android app that must read and write offline, or when you already run on Google Cloud. Spark is free, and it does not include Cloud Functions.

Prices below were verified on each vendor's pricing page in September 2026. A free Supabase project pauses after one week without traffic.

Toolradar data: Toolradar, the software directory we run, evaluated 109 low-code backend tools for its September 2026 ranking, and Supabase is in that set as the Postgres option. Firebase Firestore is tracked beside it among 23 managed databases. The listings are the low-code backend ranking and the managed database ranking.

At a glance

Product	Best for	Starting price	Standout
Supabase	Web apps that want SQL and a way to leave	$25/month on Pro	Postgres, row-level security, Docker self-host
Firebase	Offline native apps, or a team already on Google Cloud	No base fee on Blaze	Firestore cache, Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging

A backend-as-a-service, for a developer, is the hosted database, auth, and file storage you would otherwise stand up before the first feature. Supabase puts Postgres under that bundle, so a team that thinks in tables does not invent a second model. Firebase puts Cloud Firestore under a mobile suite, and SQL is an extra product you turn on with SQL Connect.

The product writeup on this site is the Supabase review. Invoice notes for that vendor sit on Toolradar's Supabase pricing page, and this page is the choice between the two.

What the sticker price leaves out

Supabase Pro stops at the quota unless you opt into overage. Spend caps are on by default, and you turn the cap off before pay-as-you-grow billing starts. That suits a team that would rather stop than open the invoice. A Google Cloud budget can email you, and the Firestore pricing page states that requests still succeed after you pass that budget, so Firebase stays up and then bills you.

The second Supabase project is the invoice people miss, because the plan sits on the organization and each project has its own compute. Supabase's pricing page works an example of two Micro projects on Pro at $35 a month: the plan fee, plus a second instance the included credit does not cover. Budget dev and prod as that pair. Branching, at $0.01344 per branch per hour on Pro, is the other preview path, and a branch you leave open is a running cost.

Free Supabase projects are capped at two active ones, and they pause after a week idle. You can keep as many paused projects as you want, which suits experiments and fails a side project that must answer a webhook on a quiet Tuesday. Firebase publishes no inactivity pause on the Spark plan, so a quiet prototype stays up.

Cloud Functions require Blaze, and the functions docs tell you to upgrade before you deploy, because the pricing table marks invocations as unavailable on Spark. Spark still includes Firestore, non-phone Auth, Hosting, Crashlytics, and Cloud Messaging at no cost. That covers a client-only prototype and stops at a trusted webhook.

SQL Connect, the Postgres path, allows one no-cost Cloud SQL instance per project for three months. If the project is not on Blaze when that trial ends, the instance is archived and deleted after another 90 days, so you lose it without a card. After the trial, Cloud SQL starts as low as $9.37 a month.

Pricing, plan by plan

Supabase bills the plan monthly, while Firebase Blaze bills usage and Spark needs no payment method. The grids are on the Supabase pricing page and the Firebase pricing page.

Plan	What you pay (USD)	What a developer should read
Supabase Free	$0	50,000 monthly active users, 500 MB database, 1 GB files, 5 GB egress, 2 active projects
Supabase Pro	$25/month	100,000 monthly active users, then $0.00325 each; 8 GB disk; 250 GB egress; spend cap on
Supabase Team	$599/month	SOC 2, ISO 27001, 14-day backups, dashboard SSO, HIPAA as a paid add-on
Supabase compute	Micro $10, Small $15, Medium $60, Large $110 a month	The included credit covers one Micro instance on Pro and Team
Firebase Spark	No charge, no card	Daily Firestore quotas; Cloud Functions not included
Firebase Blaze	Usage, Spark quotas included	$300 credit if you are eligible; functions start on this plan
SQL Connect	3-month trial, then from $9.37/month	250,000 operations a month on Blaze, then $0.90 per million

Both free tiers include 50,000 monthly active users before a paid identity rate. Pro raises Supabase's allowance to 100,000 and then charges per user. At 200,000 monthly active users the overage is $325, before the plan fee, because half of those users sit past the included allowance.

Firebase keeps that same free allowance at no cost on Blaze with Identity Platform, then publishes no list rate of its own past it. SAML on Pro includes 50 monthly active users and then $0.015 each. Firebase's SAML and OIDC allowance is also 50, then Google Cloud pricing.

Firestore in Iowa (us-central1) is cheap until a listener misbehaves. Past the free quota, reads are $0.03 per 100,000 documents and writes are $0.09 for that same batch. A million extra reads cost $0.30 and a million extra writes cost $0.90.

The free quota is daily, resetting around midnight Pacific: 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, and 20,000 deletes, plus 1 GiB stored and 10 GiB of egress a month. A launch-day spike bills even when the rest of the month is quiet. Named databases do not get that free quota, so a second database pays from the first read.

You pay a read when a listened document is added, updated, or drops out of the result because it changed, so a wide listener costs more than one fetch. Security rules that call exists(), get(), or getAfter() add a read per dependent document, and a budget alert will not cut this off.

Supabase meters egress, disk, and users, not documents, so a join-heavy dashboard does not need a read calculator. A file-heavy app still has to model egress before it treats the plan fee as the bill. Pro includes 8 GB of disk and then $0.125 per extra gigabyte, and 250 GB of egress and then nine cents per gigabyte. Files are 1 GB on Free and 100 GB on Pro, then $0.0213 per extra gigabyte.

Supabase includes 500,000 edge invocations on Free and 2 million on Pro, then $2 per extra million. Blaze includes that same paid allowance, then $0.40 per million, plus 400,000 GB-seconds, 200,000 CPU-seconds, and 5 GB of outbound networking (then $0.12 per GB). Firebase is cheaper per extra invocation once you are on Blaze, and Supabase is the one that runs a function before you add a card.

Point-in-time recovery on Supabase is $100 a month per seven days of retention. Phone multi-factor auth is $75 a month for the first project and $10 a month for each project after that. Firebase phone sign-in is unavailable on Spark and billed per SMS on Blaze, on a separate rate card.

The database you actually query

When the schema has relationships, Supabase wins, because organizations, members, and invoices are tables and foreign keys. Each project is Postgres you can open with full privileges, under the PostgreSQL license, with REST from PostgREST and GraphQL from pg_graphql. If the host becomes the problem, pg_dump is the documented exit, so pick it when you refuse a one-way door. Other hosts for that engine are in our Postgres hosting roundup.

Row-level security is the authorization model and the footgun, because policies run inside Postgres on every access. Supabase's docs state the failure: a table in an exposed schema without row-level security is readable and writable by any role that holds a grant. Adding a policy does not revoke the default grants on anon and authenticated, so the table stays public until you revoke them. The service_role key bypasses the policies and belongs on a server, never in a browser bundle.

When the data is a document the phone already holds, Firebase wins. Firestore is schemaless, so you model for the screen, duplicate fields so a query does not need a join, and accept that a security rule is application code. That fits a feed, a chat thread, or game state, and it fits poorly the week someone asks for a cohort query across accounts. A GUI on either engine is a separate choice, covered in database clients.

SQL Connect does not turn Firestore into Postgres, so a need for SQL means a second database. It is a separate Cloud SQL database, with a GraphQL schema in .gql files and generated SDKs for Kotlin, iOS, Flutter, and web. Clients call those named operations, and native SQL inside them is a preview with no SLA, which Firebase says can change in incompatible ways. If the GraphQL layer is what you want, compare it with GraphQL tools before the connector becomes your only API.

Auth, rules, and who can see a row

Both products sign people in with email and social providers on the free tier, and both get expensive at enterprise identity. Supabase Auth is GoTrue, MIT licensed, and row-level security reads auth.uid() from the JWT. Basic multi-factor auth is on every Supabase plan, while leaked-password protection, a single session per user, and session timeouts start on Pro. Dashboard SSO for your teammates is a Team feature, separate from SAML for end users.

Firebase Authentication on Spark covers the non-phone methods, and Identity Platform is the upgrade that applies the included user cap on both plans. If the second factor is SMS, price the messages before you compare database fees, because that line can dwarf either plan. The login line alone, priced for Auth0, Clerk, Supabase Auth and Firebase at 10,000 and 100,000 users, is in Authentication pricing compared.

Supabase wins when you need to explain one query, because the policy is SQL. Firebase wins when the phone must fail closed while offline, because the rules travel with the SDK. Neither replaces a gateway in front of a public webhook, and that comparison is the API gateway guide.

Functions, realtime, and the offline client

Edge Functions are TypeScript on a Deno-compatible runtime, available on Free within the invocation allowance. A Stripe webhook or a small model call fits, and a long render should move to a background worker. The Supabase CLI serves them locally, and that local stack is not the production self-host.

Cloud Functions run JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python. They can react to Firestore, Auth, and Storage when a document changes. Deploy is Blaze, then the CLI, then Cloud Build, and you pay invocations, CPU, memory, and outbound gigabytes separately.

On a side project, Supabase wins the webhook, because the function exists before you add a card. On a busy mobile app, Firebase wins the document-write trigger, because that trigger is native and the extra invocation is cheaper.

Supabase Realtime, Apache 2 licensed, can broadcast, track presence, or stream Postgres changes. Use broadcast for a cursor or a typing indicator, not a feed of every row change.

Free allows 200 peak connections and 2 million messages a month, with a 256 KB cap. Pro allows 500 connections and 5 million messages, then ten dollars per extra 1,000 connections and $2.50 per extra million messages, with a 3 MB cap. A socket per open tab will leave the connection allowance first.

Firebase Realtime Database, the older JSON tree, allows 100 simultaneous connections on Spark and 200,000 per database on Blaze, then $5 per GB stored past 1 GB. Prefer Firestore listeners, billed as reads, unless you specifically want that connection model.

For a phone that loses its signal, Firebase wins. The Firestore client caches documents the app is using and can read, write, and query that cache with no network.

Android and Apple enable this by default, while the web leaves it off and then only in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, so a mobile site does not get that cache. Conflicts are last write wins, so skip the cache when two people edit the same record. A form filled in on a subway is a Firestore problem with a documented answer, and a Next.js dashboard that is useless offline is not.

Skip Firebase Hosting if the site already deploys from Vercel. Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging, Analytics, and Performance Monitoring stay no-cost on both plans, which is the mobile bundle people mean by Firebase.

Leaving, and the compliance cliff

On the way out, Supabase wins. Docker is the documented self-host, and you give up managed branching, point-in-time recovery, managed backups, and the platform API. You patch the host and you take the backups, and support is community, not the email line that starts on Pro.

Storage in that stack is an S3-compatible API with metadata in Postgres. A VM you already know how to run, which the DigitalOcean review covers, is a realistic place for it, and the wider set is self-hosting tools.

Firebase does not offer that Compose file, so leaving means an export, a new auth system, and a rewrite of the rules. Firestore, Cloud Functions, and SQL Connect are Google Cloud services, and the price list is Spark or Blaze. The emulator is how you develop, and it is not a database you can carry to another cloud. Choose Firebase when the offline client, or the rest of Google Cloud, is worth that rewrite.

SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are on Supabase Team, at the $599 monthly fee, with 14-day backups and 28-day logs. Pro stops at seven-day backups and seven-day logs, so if an assessor wants the report, Pro is the wrong plan. Firebase publishes no SOC 2 plan tier, so read the Google Cloud contract rather than inferring one from the Spark column.

Until a log drain is on, dashboard retention is the whole trail. Pair it with log management, or with the Datadog review if that is already the on-call screen.

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Who should pick which

Pick Supabase Pro for a relational web product whose bill should stop at the quota unless someone turns the cap off. One Micro project stays at the plan fee, and two projects should be budgeted at the $35 example on the pricing page. Use Free only for prototypes you can tolerate paused.

Pick Supabase Team when a security review asks for SOC 2 or ISO 27001 on the vendor's plan list. Do not plan to upgrade in the middle of the questionnaire.

Pick Firebase Spark for a client-SDK prototype inside the daily quotas, with no server function. The moment you need a trusted webhook, a schedule, or phone auth, you are on Blaze.

Pick Blaze for a native app that must queue writes offline, or for a team that already pays Google Cloud and wants Crashlytics and Cloud Messaging in the same project. Set a budget, and also an application limit, because the budget will not reject the next read. Use SQL Connect only if you want Cloud SQL and you accept GraphQL as the client API, with the trial's deletion date on the calendar.

Pick self-hosted Supabase when the data cannot sit in a vendor region and someone owns backups, not as a way to dodge the plan fee. Other function hosts are in serverless platforms, and which model that function calls is a separate choice, covered in AI for developers.

How we compared

We read Supabase's pricing, architecture, row-level security, edge function, self-hosting, and AI guides, plus Firebase's pricing page, Cloud Functions docs, Firestore offline docs, SQL Connect docs, and the Iowa rates on Google Cloud's Firestore pricing page, on 23 September 2026. The two-project total is Supabase's published example. The million-operation totals multiply those Iowa unit prices.

Louis Corneloup, founder of Toolradar and Dupple, edited the verdict. Re-check both pricing pages before you create the production project.

FAQ

Which is better for developers in 2026, Supabase or Firebase?

Supabase is the better default for a web app that needs Postgres, joins, and a plan you can cap. Pro is $25 a month and includes one Micro instance. Firebase is the better default for a native iOS or Android app that must use cached data offline, and for a team that wants Crashlytics and Cloud Messaging on the same Google Cloud project. SQL Connect adds Cloud SQL to Firebase, but it does not replace Firestore, and it does not make the two products the same database.

How much does Supabase cost compared with Firebase?

Supabase Free is $0, pauses after a week idle, and allows two active projects. Team is $599 a month, and two Micro projects on Pro are $35 a month in the vendor's example. At 200,000 monthly active users, Pro adds $325 of overage before the plan fee, at $0.00325 each past the included 100,000.

Spark has no charge and no Cloud Functions, and Blaze has no base fee. In Iowa, a million Firestore reads past the daily quota cost $0.30, and a million writes cost $0.90.

Does the Firebase free plan include Cloud Functions?

No. Invocations are marked unavailable on Spark, and the Cloud Functions docs say to move to Blaze before you deploy. Blaze includes 2 million invocations a month, then $0.40 per million, plus CPU, memory, and outbound allowances.

Supabase includes 500,000 edge invocations on Free and 2 million on Pro, then $2 per million. A webhook can ship on Supabase before you enter a card, and a Cloud Function cannot ship on Spark.

Can I use SQL on Firebase the way I use it on Supabase?

Not against Firestore, which is a document database rather than SQL. SQL Connect is Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, called through GraphQL operations, with SDKs for Kotlin, iOS, Flutter, and web. Native SQL in those operations is a preview without an SLA, and Firebase says it can change in incompatible ways.

The first instance is a three-month trial, one per project, then from $9.37 a month, and it is removed if you never move to Blaze: archived when the trial ends, deleted 90 days later. Supabase gives you SQL on the primary database from the first project, including pg_dump and row-level security.

Which one works offline on a phone?

Firebase does this when the phone has no signal. Firestore caches the documents the app is using, allows reads and writes against that cache, and syncs later. Persistence is on by default for Android and Apple, off by default on the web, and limited on the web to Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

A listener that reconnects after more than 30 minutes, with persistence enabled, is billed as a new query. Supabase keeps the login session on the device and streams database changes over Realtime while the client is connected. Firestore is the product with a documented offline query cache.

Can I self-host Supabase or Firebase?

You can self-host Supabase with Docker: you run one project, you own patching and backups, and you do not get managed point-in-time recovery, managed backups, or branching. Support for that install is community, and the local CLI stack is for development only. Firebase's docs describe Spark and Blaze on Google Cloud, and the emulator is a development tool, not a database you can move to your own servers.

Is there a free backend I can leave in production?

Supabase Free stays up only while something uses it, so after a week idle the project pauses, and only two projects can be active. Spark can keep serving Firestore, Hosting, and Auth without a card, inside the daily quotas, and it will not run Cloud Functions. Neither free plan includes a SOC 2 report from the vendor, and on Supabase that report starts on Team. If the app must answer traffic while you are asleep, and it must run a server function, budget for a paid plan before you call the prototype done.

Cite this: Devshot, "Supabase vs Firebase (2026): Which Is Better for Developers?", September 2026.

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