Supabase vs Firebase vs PlanetScale: A Practical 2026 Comparison

By Stackvora Team · 2026-05-27 · 9 min read

Backend-as-a-service is not one market — it's three overlapping ones. Pick the wrong axis and you'll be miserable a year from now.

The one-line summary

  • Supabase — Postgres with auth, storage, edge functions and realtime, all open-source-first. Best for full-stack teams who want SQL and control.
  • Firebase — Google's opinionated NoSQL + auth + hosting. Best for solo devs and mobile teams who want to ship fast without thinking about servers.
  • PlanetScale — hyperscale MySQL (Vitess) with branching and zero-downtime schema changes. Best for teams whose bottleneck is write scale.

Data model

This is the single biggest decision:

  • Supabase — relational Postgres. Foreign keys, joins, JSONB. Familiar to anyone with SQL experience.
  • Firebase (Firestore) — document store. Great for hierarchical data, painful for anything that needs cross-collection joins.
  • PlanetScale — MySQL. No foreign keys enforced at the DB layer (Vitess limitation), but branching workflow is unmatched.

Developer experience

All three are excellent, but for different personas:

  • Firebase is best if you're building a mobile app and never want to touch a schema.
  • Supabase is best if you like SQL, want RLS-based multi-tenancy, and want the option to self-host.
  • PlanetScale is best if you have a data engineer on the team and value schema safety at scale.

Pricing at 100k MAU

Rough production estimates for a SaaS with 100k monthly active users, moderate DB usage:

  • Supabase Pro — ~$45–120/mo depending on compute add-ons.
  • Firebase Blaze — ~$150–300/mo (reads dominate).
  • PlanetScale Scaler — ~$45/mo base, plus row/storage overages.

The gotchas

  • Firebase — query costs are per-document-read; a bad list query can 10× your bill overnight.
  • Supabase — RLS is powerful but easy to get wrong; test policies with an anonymous client before shipping.
  • PlanetScale — no foreign keys means your application must enforce integrity.
The right question isn't "which is better" — it's "which failure mode am I willing to live with for 3 years." Pick accordingly.

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