Best European Alternatives to Supabase
Looking for a European alternative to Supabase? Supabase is a US company, and a managed database is where your customer data physically lives — which makes the provider's jurisdiction the most consequential choice in your whole stack.
These European providers run managed Postgres, backend platforms and full data services from data centres in France, Finland, Switzerland and beyond.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
7 European Alternatives to Supabase
Aiven
Managed open-source data platform across European clouds
Scaleway
Serverless and managed databases from French data centres
Clever Cloud
Managed Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB and Redis in the EU
Exoscale
Managed DBaaS with Swiss and EU-only regions
PocketBase
One-file backend with SQLite, auth, realtime and storage
Nhost
Postgres, GraphQL, auth and storage as one backend
Elestio
Fully managed open-source services on your own cloud account
Key takeaways
- Supabase is Apache 2.0 and genuinely self-hostable, so "it is closed" is not a reason to leave and repeating it will lose you the argument.
- Self-hosting Supabase gives up branching, managed backups, point-in-time recovery, ETL and the management API, and is community-supported rather than supported.
- The managed platform runs on AWS, so an EU region leaves both a US vendor and a US hyperscaler in the chain rather than neither.
- SOC 2 and ISO 27001 start on the $599 Team plan, which is the number to check before a security questionnaire arrives rather than after.
- Because everything underneath is standard Postgres, leaving is a pg_dump and a rewrite of the client layer, not a migration project.
Why people leave Supabase
Start by throwing out the usual complaint, because it does not apply here. Supabase is not a closed product: the repository is Apache 2.0 licensed and you can run the whole thing yourself. Anyone who tells you to leave because it is proprietary has not looked.
The real problem is narrower and harder to argue with. What you pay for is not in the repository. Supabase's own self-hosting documentation lists what the free version does not get: branching, managed backups and point-in-time recovery, advanced metrics beyond logs, analytics and vector buckets, ETL, and the platform management API. Self-hosted Studio does not even do multiple projects or organisations, and the whole configuration is community-supported rather than supported. The escape hatch exists; it is a different, smaller product.
And the jurisdiction question has no one-line answer. The terms of service name SUPABASE PTE. LTD., a Singapore entity at 65 Chulia Street, and then apply the law of California.
The privacy policy names Supabase, Inc., says the service is primarily hosted in and provided from the United States, and covers transfers to both the United States and Singapore with standard contractual clauses. Underneath all of it is AWS. Picking the Frankfurt region places your data with a US hyperscaler, under a vendor whose contract runs to a Californian court.
- The open-source version is not the product Supabase publishes the list itself, which is to its credit and also the argument. Branching, managed backups, point-in-time recovery, advanced metrics, analytics and vector buckets, ETL and the management API are platform features, not repository features. A team that adopted Supabase because "we can always self-host" should read that list before it becomes the recovery plan, because the self-hosted install is a single-project Studio with community support attached.
- Two American layers, not one The managed platform runs on AWS. Choosing eu-central-1 or eu-west-3 moves the bytes to Frankfurt or Paris and leaves two US-reachable companies in the chain: the vendor holding the contract and the hyperscaler holding the disk. Supabase's region documentation says so in as many words, noting that region selection is a data-location control rather than proof of regulatory compliance. Every provider on this page removes at least one of those two layers, and four of them remove both.
- Compliance is a pricing tier SOC 2 and ISO 27001 begin on the Team plan, which starts at $599 a month, and HIPAA is a paid add-on on top of that. For a startup that is a perfectly rational commercial decision by Supabase and a nasty surprise in month eleven, when a customer's security questionnaire arrives and the answer costs $7,188 a year before the compute. Several European providers here carry their certifications at the entry price because the certification is the reason they exist.
- The free tier is a demo, not a small plan Free projects pause after a week of inactivity and you may keep two of them. That is fine for learning and wrong for the internal tool nobody opens between quarter ends, the staging environment used in bursts, or the side project that has three users who matter. PocketBase costs nothing and never pauses, because there is no meter; Clever Cloud starts at around EUR 1.49 a month and keeps running.
What you have to replace, not just match
Supabase bundles four things that normally arrive as four purchases, and which of them you actually use decides how big this move is.
There is Postgres with an auto-generated REST interface over it. There is authentication with the social providers wired up. There is object storage with signed URLs. And there is the realtime channel plus edge functions that turn the database into an application backend rather than a database with an application in front of it.
If you use the first only, this is a managed-Postgres decision and Aiven, Scaleway, Exoscale or Clever Cloud all answer it with a dump and a restore. If you use all four, you are replacing a backend-as-a-service and the honest shortlist is Nhost or PocketBase, both of which will feel different rather than familiar. Row-level security policies travel, because they are Postgres. The generated API does not.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Aiven | Helsinki, Finland | Free tier for small services / from about $20/month, usage-based | EU (Finland) |
| #2 | Scaleway | Paris, France | From about €0.0025/hour (DEV1-S) | EU (France) |
| #3 | Clever Cloud | Nantes, France | From about €1.49/month | EU (France) |
| #4 | Exoscale | Lausanne, Switzerland | From about CHF 5.50/month (Compute) | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #5 | PocketBase | Sofia, Bulgaria | Free and open source | Wherever you run it |
| #6 | Nhost | Stockholm, Sweden | Free tier / Pro from about $25/month per project | EU (Sweden) |
| #7 | Elestio | Bucharest, Romania | From about $10/month per service plus infrastructure cost | EU (Romania) |
How each alternative compares to Supabase
- Which law reaches it. EU (Finland). Supabase is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your chosen region, including EU-only.
- Source code. Closed source, where Supabase publishes its code.
- Independently checked. Services are open source.
Best for: Teams whose Supabase project has grown into a system with a streaming problem attached
Aiven Oy is Finnish, from Helsinki, and sells the opposite proposition to Supabase. Where Supabase gives you a database wrapped in a generated API, Aiven gives you the engines and nothing else: PostgreSQL, Kafka, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, MySQL and Grafana, pinned to the regions you choose including EU-only, with a Finnish company holding the contract.
That matters at exactly the point Supabase starts to hurt. A project that outgrows a single Postgres usually needs a queue, a search index and somewhere to put events, and on Supabase those are three more vendors. Here they are line items on the same bill, under the same jurisdiction, with the same backup and failover discipline applied to each.
What you give up is everything above the database. There is no auth service, no storage bucket with signed URLs, no realtime channel and no generated REST interface. Aiven is the answer if the Supabase feature you actually depended on was Postgres, and the wrong answer if it was the four-in-one.
What Aiven does better than Supabase
- A Finnish company holds the contract, where Supabase applies Californian law through a Singapore entity
- Services can be pinned to EU-only regions across several clouds rather than to one hyperscaler
- Managed backups and failover are part of the service rather than a platform feature you lose if you self-host
- Bring Your Own Cloud puts the managed services inside an account you own, which Supabase does not offer at any tier
- Kafka, ClickHouse and OpenSearch under the same contract, where a growing Supabase project needs three more suppliers
Where Aiven is a step down from Supabase
- No authentication, storage or realtime layer, so three quarters of Supabase has to be rebuilt or bought
- No generated API over the database, so the client layer is entirely your problem
- Usage-based pricing from around $20 a month climbs faster than a $25 Pro plan for a small project
- Nothing resembling Supabase branching or the per-pull-request database copy
Standout against Supabase. It is the only provider here that manages Kafka as seriously as Postgres, which is what a Supabase project tends to need next rather than more Supabase.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Supabase is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw — EU only.
- Source code. Closed source, where Supabase publishes its code.
Best for: Teams whose objection is that Supabase runs on AWS
Scaleway is part of the Iliad Group and runs its own data centres in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw. That is the specific difference from Supabase: a Supabase project in Frankfurt sits on Amazon's hardware under a Californian contract, and a Scaleway database sits on French hardware under a French company. There is no American layer left in the chain rather than one fewer.
It is also a full cloud rather than a database service, which is the practical answer to what happens after the database. Compute, managed Kubernetes, S3-compatible object storage, serverless functions and GPU instances live in the same account and the same EU-only region, so the storage buckets you were using in Supabase have somewhere to go without a second supplier.
The trade is that Scaleway gives you components, not a backend. Authentication is a library you choose, realtime is something you build, and the generated REST API over your tables does not exist. For a team that liked Supabase because it removed decisions, this reinstates them.
What Scaleway does better than Supabase
- Owns its data centres in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw, so neither the vendor nor the infrastructure is American
- Object storage, compute and database sit in one EU-only region, removing the cross-provider hop Supabase storage implies
- Hourly billing from about EUR 0.0025 for a small instance rather than a monthly plan floor
- No project pausing, no active-project limit and no tier where certifications begin
Where Scaleway is a step down from Supabase
- No authentication, storage signing, realtime or edge functions, so most of Supabase has to be assembled
- Three data centre locations, against six EU regions on Supabase
- Support leans on documentation and community at the lower tiers
- Nothing equivalent to Supabase Studio, so administering the database is psql and a client of your choosing
Standout against Supabase. It is the only option here that owns the buildings, which is the difference between moving away from an American vendor and moving away from American infrastructure as well.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Supabase is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU data centres.
- Source code. Closed source, where Supabase publishes its code.
Best for: Small teams who used Supabase as somewhere to put an app, not just a database
Clever Cloud, from Nantes, is a platform-as-a-service with managed databases attached, which makes it the closest thing here to the experience of Supabase: you push code, the platform builds it, and the PostgreSQL add-on is wired into the application rather than provisioned as a separate decision with a connection string to copy.
Its compliance position is unusually explicit for a company of this size, and the relevant part for a database is where the disk sits. The servers are in data centres Clever Cloud owns in France, certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and approved for hosting health data, with a SecNumCloud zone available on request through Cloud Temple. Compare that with a Supabase project: the disk is Amazon's, the contract is Californian, and no plan on the pricing page changes either.
Where it falls short against Supabase is above the database. There is no auth service, no storage with signed URLs and no generated API, so a project that used all four Supabase pieces replaces three of them elsewhere. It is also a small catalogue: fine for an application and a database, thin if you wanted managed Kafka next year.
What Clever Cloud does better than Supabase
- Deploy from Git with the database attached, which is the part of Supabase that new projects actually miss
- French company, French data centres and a SecNumCloud zone through Cloud Temple, against a Californian choice of law
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and health data hosting certification at the ordinary price, not from a $599 tier
- From about EUR 1.49 a month with no pausing, against a free tier that stops after a week of inactivity
Where Clever Cloud is a step down from Supabase
- No authentication, object storage signing, realtime channel or edge functions
- No generated REST interface over your tables, so the client layer is rewritten entirely
- A smaller managed-service catalogue than Aiven if the project keeps growing
- Pay-as-you-go compute on a busy database costs more than the equivalent rented server would
Standout against Supabase. It is the only entry here that states in its own words that the platform is built so customer data is out of reach of extraterritorial law, which is the claim Supabase cannot make in any region.
- Which law reaches it. Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). Supabase is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria.
- Source code. Closed source, where Supabase publishes its code.
Best for: Regulated teams whose procurement rules treat Switzerland as a feature
Exoscale is the trademark of Akenes SA in Lausanne, founded in 2011 and now part of A1 Digital, which belongs to the A1 Telekom Austria Group. That ownership chain is worth stating rather than hiding: the company is Swiss, the parent is Austrian and listed in Vienna, and no part of it is reachable through United States corporate law, which is the specific thing that is not true of Supabase.
For a Supabase project the practical draw is Database-as-a-Service next to compute, object storage and managed Kubernetes in regions covering Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria. The Austrian and Bulgarian locations matter for latency in central and eastern Europe, where a Supabase user is choosing between Frankfurt and a worse round trip.
Switzerland is adequacy rather than intra-EEA processing, which suits some procurement rules and irritates others, so check which kind you have before treating it as a straight upgrade. And as with the rest of the infrastructure entries, everything Supabase did above the database is now yours to build.
What Exoscale does better than Supabase
- Swiss company under Austrian ownership, outside both US corporate law and EU jurisdiction, where Supabase contracts under Californian law
- Managed databases alongside compute, object storage and Kubernetes in one account
- Regions in Austria and Bulgaria, which no Supabase region covers
- Trial credits and per-instance pricing from about CHF 5.50 a month with nothing that pauses
Where Exoscale is a step down from Supabase
- Adequacy rather than intra-EEA processing, which some public buyers specifically exclude
- No authentication, storage signing, realtime or functions layer at all
- A smaller catalogue and a smaller community than Supabase by a wide margin
- Database-as-a-Service is priced separately from compute, so the entry figure understates a real setup
Standout against Supabase. It is the only entry here with managed data services in Vienna and Sofia, which is the part of Europe a Supabase region list simply does not reach.
- Which law reaches it. Wherever you run it. Supabase is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Wherever you run the binary.
- Source code. Open source, as Supabase is.
Best for: Projects small enough that the right number of vendors is zero
PocketBase is one executable file built by Gani Georgiev in Sofia, MIT-licensed, containing SQLite, authentication with OAuth2, file storage, realtime subscriptions, an admin dashboard and a REST API. It is the same four jobs Supabase does, compressed into something you copy onto a server and run.
Against Supabase specifically, it answers two complaints at once. There is no provider, so the Singapore entity, the Californian governing law and the AWS layer all cease to exist as questions. And there is no meter, so nothing pauses after a week, there is no two-project limit, and no customer questionnaire ever forces you onto a $599 plan to obtain a certificate.
The limit is honest and permanent. SQLite has a single writer and scales up rather than out, so this fits internal tools, small applications and prototypes and does not fit a write-heavy system. It is also effectively one maintainer, which for a company betting a product on it is a genuine continuity question rather than a snobbery about project size.
What PocketBase does better than Supabase
- No provider at all, so neither Californian law nor AWS appears anywhere in the chain
- Database, auth, storage and realtime in one binary, which is the same bundle Supabase sells as a platform
- Free at any size, with no pausing, no project cap and no tier gate on anything
- Backup and disaster recovery are copying a file, against a Supabase point-in-time recovery feature that is platform-only
- MIT-licensed and extensible in Go or JavaScript, so the whole thing is genuinely yours
Where PocketBase is a step down from Supabase
- SQLite with a single writer, where Supabase gives you real PostgreSQL
- One maintainer against a funded company, which matters over a five-year horizon
- No managed hosting, so uptime, patching and backups are entirely your job
- No branching, no ETL and none of the operational tooling Supabase Pro includes
Standout against Supabase. It is the only entry here where the answer to "who could be compelled to hand this over" is nobody, because there is no second party in the arrangement.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Sweden). Supabase is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU regions available.
- Source code. Open source, as Supabase is.
Best for: Teams who want the whole Supabase shape from an EU company
Nhost AB is Swedish, from Stockholm, and is the only entry on this page that replaces Supabase rather than dismantling it: PostgreSQL, authentication with OAuth providers, file storage with image transforms, serverless functions and an instant API, with EU regions and a free tier, Pro from about $25 a month per project.
The one real difference in shape is the API. Supabase generates REST over your tables through PostgREST; Nhost generates GraphQL through Hasura with row-level permissions. For a team that has never written a GraphQL query that is a genuine learning curve in the first fortnight, and for a team that has, it is the reason to switch rather than a cost.
The whole stack is MIT-licensed and self-hostable via Docker, and unlike Supabase the self-hosted version is the same stack rather than a reduced one. The honest caveat is size: a small Swedish company with a much smaller ecosystem, so expect to read source where you used to read a tutorial.
What Nhost does better than Supabase
- Swedish company under EU jurisdiction, where Supabase contracts through Singapore under Californian law
- Standard PostgreSQL underneath, so the exit from Nhost is the same cheap dump and restore
- The entire stack is MIT-licensed and self-hostable rather than a platform with a thinner open-source edition beneath it
- Row-level permissions expressed in the API layer rather than only in database policies
Where Nhost is a step down from Supabase
- GraphQL and Hasura are a real learning curve for a team that came for PostgREST
- A far smaller ecosystem, community and tutorial base than Supabase
- A small company relative to Supabase, which is a continuity consideration for a production backend
- The free tier is modest and the per-project Pro pricing adds up across environments
Standout against Supabase. It is the only entry here where self-hosting gets you the same stack rather than a reduced one, which is precisely the promise Supabase's licence implies and its documentation withdraws.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Romania). Supabase is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own cloud account or chosen EU region.
- Source code. Closed source, where Supabase publishes its code.
- Independently checked. Deployed services are open source.
Best for: Organisations whose rule is that the data must stay in their own account
Elestio SRL, from Bucharest, inverts the arrangement Supabase sells. A managed platform normally runs on the vendor's infrastructure under the vendor's account; Elestio deploys and manages open-source services inside your cloud account or on dedicated European hardware, handling updates, backups, monitoring and TLS while the servers stay on your bill.
For a team leaving Supabase over control rather than over features, that resolves the deadlock directly. You keep somebody competent doing the operations, which is the actual reason nobody self-hosts Supabase, and the data never sits in an account you cannot see. A compliance requirement that says the data must live in infrastructure the organisation controls cannot be satisfied by any Supabase plan and is satisfied here by default.
Two costs are worth naming. You pay twice, about $10 a month per service plus the underlying infrastructure, and the management layer itself is proprietary even though everything it deploys is open source. Elestio is also a young company running production systems on your behalf, which is a different risk from a young company hosting them.
What Elestio does better than Supabase
- Runs the managed services inside your own cloud account, which no Supabase tier offers
- Romanian company under EU jurisdiction, deploying into the region you choose
- You can have Postgres, object storage and the rest of the stack managed without a single vendor holding all of it
- If the management layer disappears, the running systems are still in your account rather than somewhere you need to be granted access to
Where Elestio is a step down from Supabase
- Two bills instead of one, and the underlying infrastructure cost is yours to forecast
- The management layer is proprietary, so the ownership argument is partial rather than total
- A young and small company operating production systems on your behalf
- It manages open-source components rather than giving you a backend, so nothing here is a Supabase feature match
Standout against Supabase. It is the only entry here that gives you managed operations and account ownership at the same time, which is the trade Supabase asks you to accept as impossible.
What actually breaks when you switch
The database is the easy half and people plan for the wrong one. Postgres comes out with pg_dump and goes in intact, with policies, functions and triggers attached. What does not come out is the API surface: every supabase-js call speaks to PostgREST, GoTrue or the storage service, and all of it is rewritten against whatever you move to. On a medium codebase that is a fortnight, not a weekend.
Authentication is where migrations quietly stall. Supabase stores hashed passwords you can export, but the sessions, refresh tokens and OAuth connections do not transfer, so every active user is logged out at cutover and anyone who signed in with a social provider has to reconnect. Plan the email, pick a quiet week, and expect a support spike rather than a silent switch.
And check the storage bill before you commit. Objects in Supabase Storage live in its buckets with signed URLs that expire, and those URLs are frequently embedded in records, emails and third-party systems. Moving the files is a copy; finding every reference to them is an audit, and it is the part that surfaces months later one broken image at a time.
If Supabase is open source, why not just self-host it and stop there?
Because the thing you would be running is not the thing you have been using. Supabase documents the gap plainly: self-hosted installs have no branching, no managed backups or point-in-time recovery, no advanced metrics beyond logs, no analytics or vector buckets, no ETL and no platform management API, and self-hosted Studio does not handle multiple organisations or projects.
Support is the second half. Self-hosted Supabase is community-supported through GitHub, Discord and Reddit. That is a reasonable arrangement for a hobby project and an unreasonable one for a database whose loss ends the company, and the person who ends up carrying it is usually the engineer who suggested it.
The version of this that works is running the pieces rather than the bundle: Postgres from a European managed provider, an auth library you choose, object storage separately. That is more decisions and fewer surprises, and it is what Aiven, Scaleway and Exoscale are selling.
Does picking the Frankfurt region solve the jurisdiction problem?
It solves the storage question and leaves the disclosure question open, and Supabase says as much in its own region documentation, which notes that region selection is a data-location control rather than proof of regulatory compliance.
The chain is worth writing out. Supabase's terms name a Singapore entity and apply Californian law. Its privacy policy names Supabase, Inc., describes the service as primarily hosted in and provided from the United States, and relies on standard contractual clauses for transfers to both the United States and Singapore. The infrastructure is AWS. A German court order is not the instrument that reaches any of that.
If your requirement is a procurement line saying data must reside in the EU, eu-central-1 satisfies it. If it is a risk assessment about which state can compel production, you need a provider established in Europe, and that is the entire list on this page bar one.
What actually breaks when you move off Supabase?
Not the data. Postgres is Postgres, so the schema, the row-level security policies, the functions and the triggers all survive a dump and restore. That is the single best thing about having chosen Supabase in the first place and it is why this migration is cheaper than most.
The client layer breaks. supabase-js talks to PostgREST, GoTrue and the storage service, and none of those endpoints exists anywhere else in the same shape. Every call in your application is rewritten against whatever you move to, which on a medium codebase is a fortnight rather than an afternoon.
Edge functions and realtime subscriptions are the parts people forget until deployment day. Realtime has an equivalent in Nhost and PocketBase and no equivalent at all in a plain managed Postgres. Write down how many of your features depend on a live subscription before you choose, because that number decides which half of this page you are shopping in.
Is a European backend-as-a-service actually mature enough to bet on?
Nhost is the closest thing to a like-for-like European swap: Postgres underneath, an instant GraphQL API on top, authentication, storage and functions, MIT-licensed and self-hostable from Stockholm. The honest caveat is size. Nhost AB is a small Swedish company and its ecosystem is a fraction of Supabase's, so you will be reading source rather than blog posts when something is odd.
PocketBase is the other shape of answer and the one people underrate. It is a single binary with SQLite, auth, storage and realtime inside it, which means no vendor, no meter and no pausing. It is also effectively a one-person project on a single-writer database, which is a real constraint rather than a temporary one.
If betting on a small company is the part you cannot accept, do not buy a backend at all. Buy managed Postgres from Aiven, Scaleway, Exoscale or Clever Cloud, all of which have been running production data for a decade or more, and assemble the rest yourself.
Which one to pick
If what you genuinely use is Postgres with a thin API over it, stop shopping for a backend. Aiven if the system is growing towards queues and search, Scaleway if the objection is that AWS is underneath, Exoscale if being outside the EU as well as outside the US is a requirement rather than a preference.
If you use all four Supabase pieces and want to keep that shape, Nhost is the only entry here that offers it from an EU company, and its self-hosted edition is the same stack rather than a reduced one. Accept GraphQL as the price of entry.
If the project is small and you are tired of meters, PocketBase removes the vendor entirely and never pauses. Read the single-writer constraint as a permanent property, not a version number.
And if the blocker is that nobody wants to run the servers but the data must live in your own account, Elestio is the arrangement almost nobody knows exists. It costs two invoices and it is the only answer on this page to a compliance rule that Supabase cannot satisfy at any price.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on which part of Supabase you use. Nhost if you want the whole backend-as-a-service shape with Postgres underneath. PocketBase if you want no vendor at all and your write volume is modest. Aiven, Scaleway, Exoscale or Clever Cloud if what you really use is the database and you can assemble auth and storage yourself. Elestio if you want somebody to run open source inside your own cloud account.
Yes, the repository is Apache 2.0 licensed and self-hostable, which makes the usual "proprietary American SaaS" complaint inaccurate here. It matters less than it sounds, because the self-hosted build has no branching, no managed backups or point-in-time recovery, no ETL and no management API, and is community-supported. The licence is real; the equivalence is not.
Yes. Projects can be created in Ireland, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich or Stockholm, all on AWS. Supabase's own documentation adds the caveat worth quoting to your compliance officer: region selection is a data-location control rather than proof of regulatory compliance. The company remains contractually reachable through Californian law and the hardware remains Amazon's.
Free covers two projects that pause after a week of inactivity. Pro starts at $25 a month including $10 of compute credits, and each additional project adds its own compute on top. Team is $599 a month and is where SOC 2 and ISO 27001 begin, with HIPAA as a paid add-on above that. The jump from Pro to Team is the one that catches people, because it is usually triggered by a customer rather than by usage.
The database itself is easy, because it is unmodified Postgres: pg_dump out, restore in, and the schema, row-level security policies, functions and triggers all arrive intact. The work is the client layer, where every supabase-js call has to be rewritten against a different API. Budget a fortnight of engineering on a medium codebase and more if you lean on realtime or edge functions.
Yes, and this is the part people assume they will lose. Row-level security is a PostgreSQL feature rather than a Supabase one, so the policies move with the dump to Aiven, Scaleway, Exoscale, Clever Cloud or Nhost, all of which run standard Postgres. What you lose is the JWT plumbing that populated the claims those policies read, which you rebuild against whatever authentication you choose.
Three things. Branching, which spins up a full copy of the database per pull request and has no equivalent on this page. The breadth of the client libraries and the community around them, which is where most of the practical value of a backend-as-a-service actually sits. And the sheer volume of tutorials, which is worth more to a small team than any feature comparison admits.
Serious, within a stated limit. It is a single executable containing SQLite, authentication, file storage, realtime and an admin interface, MIT-licensed, with no provider anywhere in the picture. The limit is architectural rather than immaturity: SQLite has one writer and scales vertically, so it fits internal tools and small to medium applications and does not fit a write-heavy system. It is also a solo-maintainer project, which belongs in the decision.
No, and Elestio is the option most people do not know exists. It deploys and manages open-source services inside your own cloud account or on European hardware, so the operations are somebody else's job while the infrastructure and the data stay on your bill. Bring Your Own Cloud at Aiven arranges the data services the same way. Both cost two invoices instead of one.
Who worked on this review
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