Best Supabase Alternatives in 2026 (Compared)

The best Supabase alternatives in 2026 are StitchDB (same APIs as Supabase, hosted in the EU, lower entry price), Neon (serverless Postgres with branching and new backend add-ons), PlanetScale (high-performance managed Postgres and MySQL), Firebase (if you don't need SQL), and a self-hosted Supabase stack if you want full control. Which one fits depends on whether you want a full backend or only a database, and on how much of your existing Supabase code you want to keep.

This guide compares the main Supabase alternatives on what actually changes your bill and your code: free tier limits, included amounts on the first paid plan, backups, branching, regions and how hard it is to move. All prices are as of November 2026 and come from each vendor's own pricing page.

#Quick comparison

#Why people look for a Supabase alternative

Supabase is a good product, and a lot of the reasons to leave are about fit, not quality. The common ones:

• Price of the second step. Supabase Free is generous, but the jump to Pro is $25 a month (as of November 2026), and point-in-time recovery is an add-on at $100 a month per 7 days of retention on the pricing page. For a small production app, PITR is often the line item that hurts.
• Paused free projects. Free Supabase projects are paused after one week of inactivity. That is fine for experiments and annoying for a demo or a side project with occasional traffic.
• Data location. Supabase has EU regions (Ireland, Paris, Frankfurt and Stockholm), but the company and its default infrastructure run on AWS. Some teams want an EU provider on EU servers.
• Only needing a database. If you use Supabase only as hosted Postgres, a database-first host can be simpler and cheaper.

#1. StitchDB

StitchDB is a hosted backend with a dedicated Postgres database per project, plus Auth, a REST API generated from your schema, GraphQL, Realtime, Storage and Deno Edge Functions. It speaks the same protocols as the open-source Supabase stack: PostgREST for REST, GoTrue-style Auth, the Storage API, Realtime channels and Deno functions, with the same paths, headers, JWT roles and error formats. The compatibility page lists what works unchanged, and in most apps the switch is two environment variables:

# before
API_URL=https://<old-project>.supabase.co
ANON_KEY=eyJhbGciOi...
# after
API_URL=https://<project-ref>.p.stitchdb.com
ANON_KEY=<the anon key from Settings > API>

Your queries, auth calls and RLS policies stay the same. Policies with auth.uid() and auth.jwt() work, and so do the anon, authenticated and service_role roles.

Plans (as of November 2026). Free is $0 with 2 projects, 500 MB of database, 1 GB of files, 50,000 monthly active users, 25 GB egress and 1 day of point-in-time recovery. Pro is $15.99 a month with 10 GB of database per project, 100 GB of files, 100,000 MAU, 1 TB egress, 7 days of point-in-time recovery, daily backups and 3 preview branches. Scale is $49 and Enterprise $329. See Pricing and Plans and limits.

What stands out:

• Point-in-time recovery is included on every plan, including Free (24 hours). See Backups.
• Free projects are not paused while you use your account. Only accounts nobody has touched for a year are paused, after two e-mail warnings (inactive projects).
• The spend cap is on by default on paid plans, so the plan price is the most you pay unless you turn it off (spend cap).
• An Import from Supabase wizard copies your database, auth users with their password hashes, buckets and files, cron jobs, Edge Function code and Auth settings, with a live copy and a switch-over that takes seconds.
• AI agent keys with a query firewall, approvals and per-session undo, if you let coding agents touch your database.

Trade-offs to know:

• Regions are EU only (data centers in Germany and Finland). If most of your users are in the US or Asia, latency will be higher than with a provider that has regions there.
• It is a younger platform than Supabase, with a smaller community and fewer third-party tutorials (though most Supabase tutorials apply).
• There is no self-hosted edition. The CLI runs a full local stack for development, but production runs on StitchDB.
• Free REST and Auth services sleep after 60 minutes without requests and wake within a few seconds; the database stays online.

Best for: teams who like the Supabase developer experience and want lower entry pricing, PITR without an add-on, or EU hosting.

#2. Self-hosted Supabase

Supabase can be self-hosted with Docker Compose, as described in its self-hosting guide. You keep every API and run it on your own servers or cloud account.

Pros: no vendor bill beyond your servers, full control over data location, no project pausing, the same code.

Cons: you run Postgres yourself, which means backups, upgrades, monitoring, TLS, connection pooling and security patches are your job. Some hosted-only features (branching, the managed dashboard features) are not the same experience.

Best for: teams with ops capacity, or with a hard requirement to run inside their own infrastructure.

#3. Neon

Neon is serverless Postgres: storage and compute are separate, compute scales to zero after 5 minutes idle, and branches are cheap copies of your database. In 2026 Neon also lists backend services on its pricing page: Managed Better Auth, a Data API over HTTP, Object Storage and Functions, with Realtime in beta.

Pricing (as of November 2026): Free gives 100 CU-hours per project per month, 1 GB of storage per project (20 GB across the account), a 6-hour restore window and up to 60,000 auth MAU per project. Launch is usage-based at $0.106 per CU-hour and $0.35 per GB-month, with no monthly minimum and up to 7 days of restore history. Details on neon.com/pricing.

Pros: excellent branching, scale to zero, and you pay close to nothing for idle dev databases.

Cons: usage billing is harder to predict than a flat plan, and Neon documents spending notifications (alerts at 80% and 100% of a threshold), not a hard cap. The backend services are newer than its database, and the client APIs are not the Supabase ones, so supabase-js code needs rework.

Best for: database-first teams, preview environments per pull request, serverless workloads with long idle periods.

#4. PlanetScale

PlanetScale offers managed Postgres and Vitess (MySQL-compatible). Production Postgres clusters run a primary and two replicas across availability zones, and Metal plans use local NVMe drives.

Pricing (as of November 2026): there is no free plan; the Hobby tier was retired on April 8, 2024. Postgres starts at $5 a month for a single-node PS-5 and $15 for the HA version in AWS us-east-1. See planetscale.com/pricing.

Pros: strong performance options, HA by default on production clusters, AWS, GCP and Azure regions, horizontal sharding.

Cons: it is a database, not a backend. Auth, file storage, a REST API and realtime are yours to build or buy.

Best for: teams with their own API layer who care most about database performance and scale. More in StitchDB vs PlanetScale.

#5. Firebase

Firebase is Google's backend platform: Firestore (a document database), Authentication, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions and hosting. It is mature and well documented, with very good mobile SDKs and offline support.

Pros: offline sync and mobile tooling, global Google infrastructure, a huge community.

Cons: it is not SQL. Joins, constraints and RLS-style policies in SQL don't exist; you model data around queries and write security rules instead. Moving from Supabase to Firebase is a rewrite, not a migration.

Best for: mobile-first apps that value offline sync over relational data.

#Which Supabase alternative should you pick?

• You want the same code and a cheaper or EU-hosted home: StitchDB.
• You must run on your own servers: self-hosted Supabase.
• You only need Postgres, with many short-lived branches: Neon.
• You need maximum database performance and run your own API: PlanetScale.
• You don't need SQL and live on mobile: Firebase.

And sometimes the answer is to stay. If your users are spread across the US and Asia, you rely on Supabase's larger ecosystem of integrations and tutorials, or you need regions outside Europe, Supabase is still a strong choice. Compare the two directly in StitchDB vs Supabase.

#How to move without downtime

If you pick StitchDB, the import works like this:

1. Create an empty project and open Database > Import from Postgres > Import from Supabase.
2. Paste a Supabase personal access token and pick the project. Enter the database password.
3. Start a live copy. Tables are copied and kept in sync through logical replication.
4. When Studio shows Caught up, point your app at the new URL and keys, pause writes for a minute and choose Switch over.

Users keep their passwords and user ids, so auth.uid() policies and foreign keys to auth.users keep working. Signed-in users sign in once again. The step-by-step guide is in How to migrate from Supabase to StitchDB.

#FAQ

#Is there an open source Supabase alternative?

Supabase itself can be self-hosted. Other open-source backends such as Appwrite and PocketBase exist but use different APIs, so moving to them means rewriting data access code.

#Which Supabase alternative works with supabase-js?

StitchDB speaks the same REST, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Function APIs, so supabase-js and the other Supabase client libraries work after you change the project URL and keys.

#Is StitchDB cheaper than Supabase?

The entry paid plan is $15.99 a month versus $25 for Supabase Pro (as of November 2026), and point-in-time recovery is included instead of being an add-on. Usage above the included amounts is priced per plan on the spend cap page.

#Do free Supabase alternatives pause inactive projects?

Supabase pauses Free projects after a week of inactivity. Neon suspends compute after 5 minutes idle and resumes on the next query. StitchDB keeps free projects online unless the whole account is unused for a year.

#Can I keep my Row Level Security policies?

Yes on StitchDB and self-hosted Supabase, because both use Postgres roles and auth.uid() the same way. On database-only hosts the policies survive, but there is no built-in Auth issuing the JWTs they check.

Ready to try it with your own project? Create a free StitchDB account and run the import.