Supabase

Supabase is a backend platform built around a dedicated Postgres database per project, with authentication, object storage, serverless functions and realtime layered on top. The distinguishing choice is that none of it hides the database: the data model is plain Postgres, so psql, Prisma, Drizzle and any other Postgres client or ORM work directly against a project, and several features are Postgres extensions rather than proprietary services.

What comes with it

• Database — Postgres with auto-generated REST (PostgREST) and GraphQL APIs, a table editor and a SQL editor
• Auth — email and password, magic links, phone OTP and OAuth providers, wired into Row Level Security policies, which are also what guards Storage
• Storage — S3-compatible object storage behind a CDN, with image transformations
• Edge Functions — TypeScript on Deno with Node compatibility, deployed globally
• Realtime — WebSocket sync in three modes: listening to Postgres changes, presence (who is online) and broadcast
• AI & Vectors — pgvector for storing and querying embeddings next to transactional data
• Queues — the pgmq extension, so queues are ordinary tables reachable from any Postgres tooling
• Cron — pg_cron, with jobs stored in the cron.job table and their history in cron.job_run_details; the docs recommend keeping concurrency at 8 jobs or fewer and each run under 10 minutes

Official client libraries cover JavaScript, Flutter (Dart), Swift, Python, C# and Kotlin. For AI tooling there is an MCP server at https://mcp.supabase.com/mcp and a set of agent skills installed with npx skills add supabase/agent-skills.

Local development

The CLI runs the whole stack on your machine — Postgres, Auth, Storage and the rest — rather than making you develop against the cloud:

npx supabase init
npx supabase start

This needs a container runtime; the docs name OrbStack, Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop and Podman (see Docker on macOS). Schema changes are managed as migrations or declarative schemas and then pushed to the hosted project.

Licensing and self-hosting

Supabase is genuinely open source under OSI-approved licences, component by component: the main repository and the dashboard are Apache-2.0, as are Realtime and Storage, while Auth and the Edge Runtime are MIT. That is worth noting next to Convex, where the equivalent claim rests on the non-OSI Functional Source License.

Self-hosting is documented for the individual components, so a project can be run entirely on your own infrastructure.