Supabase alternatives: when the defaults stop working for your stack
Published · Grounded in real discussions
Supabase has become a default starting point for a lot of backend work, but a handful of specific friction points push developers to look elsewhere: per-project pricing that punishes multi-environment setups, full-text search that falls apart at scale, Row Level Security that silently breaks things, and a self-hosted experience that doesn't quite match the cloud version. If you've hit one of those walls, the question isn't whether to leave — it's which tool actually fits your situation.
By situation: which alternative makes sense
If RLS is the thing breaking your workflow
This is the most-discussed reason developers start questioning Supabase. The default behavior — queries silently returning nothing when no policy exists — catches people off guard, and writing Postgres policies by hand gets painful fast, especially in agent-driven or automated workflows where access patterns are less predictable.
Firebase is the obvious first stop for many developers, and it's genuinely flexible on the auth and security side. The trade-off is that it's closed source, which rules it out immediately if you're building something open-source or need to audit the stack. It also won't help if your frustration is specifically with the Postgres-centric model — Firebase takes a different architectural approach entirely, so you're not so much solving the RLS problem as stepping around it.
InsForge AI is aimed directly at this pain. It's open-source and built around the idea that security defaults should work correctly without requiring manual policy authoring — it ships APIs through MCP servers with what it describes as sane defaults for agent workflows. It's a newer entrant with less community signal behind it, so if you're evaluating it, factor in the maturity question.
Silobase takes a different angle: it's an open-source BaaS packaged as an npm module that lets you drop a REST API on top of your own database with minimal configuration. It sidesteps the RLS model rather than replacing it. If your core complaint is the policy-writing overhead and you want something you can deploy quickly without a managed platform, it's worth a look — though the trade-off is that you own more of the operational surface.
If you're an AI/agent workflow builder specifically, the choice between InsForge AI and Silobase comes down to whether you want a platform that handles the security model for you (InsForge AI) or a thin layer you control entirely (Silobase).
If full-text search is timing out on large datasets
There's documented evidence of Supabase's full-text search producing 8-second-plus timeouts on large datasets, even after indexing. At least one developer migrated entirely because of this.
PocketBase is the most concrete option here. That same migration scenario — moving a large dataset off Supabase — resulted in query times dropping from those 8-second timeouts to under 2,000ms. That's a meaningful difference, not a marginal one. PocketBase is a self-contained backend with its own database, so migrating to it means accepting a different data model and giving up the Postgres ecosystem. If you're heavily invested in Postgres tooling, that's a real cost. But if your primary constraint is search performance on a large record set, the reported gains are hard to ignore.
If per-project pricing is the problem
Supabase charges per project, which means separate dev, staging, and production environments each cost extra. For freelancers or agencies managing several client projects simultaneously, this adds up quickly.
Convex has come up as a candidate here, but users report hitting its usage limits fast in multi-project scenarios. It's not a strong fit for this use case based on what's been reported. The honest answer is that the grounded alternatives don't offer a clear winner for this specific pain — the gap in the market for affordable, environment-bundled pricing is real, and no alternative in this set has strong signal as the solution.
If you're trying to self-host and hitting feature gaps
Self-hosting Supabase surfaces a specific technical constraint: the auth setup depends on the pgjwt extension, which isn't supported on major managed Postgres services. If you're running on AWS RDS or Azure PostgreSQL, you can't use Supabase's self-hosted auth as-is. This isn't a minor configuration issue — it's an architectural incompatibility that blocks the self-hosting path for anyone already on those platforms.
Neither AWS RDS nor Azure PostgreSQL is an alternative to Supabase in the usual sense; they're the databases you might want to use underneath a self-hosted setup. The practical implication is that if you're committed to a managed Postgres service from a major cloud provider and also want Supabase's auth layer, the self-hosted route currently doesn't work. You'd need to use Supabase's cloud offering, pick a different auth solution, or choose a BaaS that doesn't carry this dependency.
The right call here depends almost entirely on which specific constraint is costing you time or money. RLS complexity, search performance, pricing structure, and self-hosting compatibility are four different problems that point toward different tools. If you're hitting the RLS wall and need open-source compatibility, InsForge AI or Silobase are the targeted options, with Firebase as the pragmatic fallback if open-source isn't a requirement. If search performance is the blocker, PocketBase has the most concrete evidence behind it. For multi-project pricing, the honest answer is that the current alternatives don't solve it cleanly — that's a gap worth watching.