Firebase vs Supabase vs MySQL: Which Should You Use?

Choosing a database is one of the first decisions on a new project, and one of the hardest to undo. Moving a live product to a different database later means rewriting queries, migrating data and retesting everything.

Most teams now pick between three kinds of backend: a managed NoSQL platform (Firebase), an open source backend-as-a-service built on Postgres (Supabase), or a traditional relational database you run yourself (MySQL). This guide compares them on the points that usually decide the choice.

Firebase: managed NoSQL from Google

Firebase is Google's backend-as-a-service. Its main database, Firestore, is a managed NoSQL document store.

There are no servers to provision or patch, and Firestore scales automatically. Firebase also bundles the pieces most apps need around the database: Authentication, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage and Hosting.

The attraction is speed. A small team can have a working real-time app online in a day. The cost is lock-in. Firestore's data model and query API are proprietary, so moving a large dataset off Firebase later is a significant project.

Supabase: open source, built on Postgres

Supabase describes itself as an open source Firebase alternative. It offers a similar dashboard and developer experience, but the database underneath is PostgreSQL.

Each Supabase project is a dedicated Postgres database with extra services on top: an auto-generated REST API (PostgREST), a GraphQL endpoint, a Realtime service over WebSockets, file storage, and authentication that works with Postgres Row Level Security.

Because it is standard Postgres, you can export everything with pg_dump and move to AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL or your own server without changing your schema.

MySQL: the established relational database

MySQL has run a large share of the web for decades, including most WordPress sites and many enterprise systems.

MySQL is only a database engine. It does not include user authentication, an auto-generated API or real-time subscriptions. Your backend, written in something like Laravel, Django, Spring Boot or Express, provides those.

The main advantage of MySQL is control. You decide how the infrastructure scales, how backups run and what you pay for. If the application needs complex relational queries, with multi-table JOINs across large historical tables, MySQL handles that workload well.

Head to head

Pricing and scaling

Firestore bills per document read, write and delete. That is close to free for a new app with few users. It can become expensive quickly with heavy traffic or inefficient queries, for example a client that re-reads a large collection on every screen. Scaling is automatic, so set budget alerts.

Supabase charges by plan, and each plan comes with a fixed amount of compute and database size. If your database outgrows its plan, performance drops until you move to a larger instance. At high volume it is usually cheaper than Firebase, but you need to watch resource use yourself.

Managed MySQL (for example AWS RDS) is billed by instance size and hours, so costs are predictable. The trade-off is that a traffic spike beyond the instance's capacity slows the database down until you scale it up, which can mean a short period of downtime.

Data model: documents or tables

Firestore stores JSON-like documents in collections. You do not need to define a schema up front, which makes early prototyping fast. It is weak at relational queries: there are no joins, so data is usually duplicated across documents, and keeping those copies consistent becomes your job.

Supabase and MySQL are relational. You define tables, columns and foreign keys before inserting data, and the database enforces them. That makes data more consistent and makes complex reporting queries with several JOINs straightforward.

Real-time updates

Firebase is strongest at real-time data. Firestore pushes changes to every connected client with no extra work, which makes chat apps and collaborative editors quick to build.

Supabase closes much of that gap with its Realtime service, which reads Postgres replication logs and broadcasts row changes over WebSockets. You get real-time updates on top of ordinary SQL tables.

MySQL has no built-in real-time subscriptions. If you need clients to update when rows change, you have to build it yourself, either with polling or with a message broker such as Redis or Kafka.

Authentication

Firebase Authentication is mature and widely used. Email and password sign-in, social providers and multi-factor authentication all work with very little configuration.

Supabase Auth (built on GoTrue) stores users in your Postgres database. That lets you write Row Level Security (RLS) policies that tie each user to the rows they are allowed to read or change, enforced by the database itself.

MySQL has no authentication layer for your app's users. You need to handle sign-up, sessions and password hashing yourself, typically with a framework's auth library and a slow hash such as bcrypt or Argon2.

Which should you choose?

There is no single winner. The right choice depends on your data model, your team and how you expect the product to grow.

Choose Firebase if: You need to ship a real-time MVP quickly, your team would rather not manage infrastructure, and your data fits documents and client-side subscriptions better than normalised tables.

Choose Supabase if: You like Firebase's developer experience but want to avoid proprietary lock-in. You get a real Postgres database with SQL, plus auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs.

Choose MySQL if: You have backend engineers who can run and secure the database, you want predictable hosting costs, or you need to integrate with existing systems that already use MySQL.

	Firebase (Firestore)	Supabase (PostgreSQL)	MySQL
Data model	NoSQL documents	Relational SQL	Relational SQL
How your app talks to it	Client SDKs	Auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs, or SQL	SQL from your backend
Lock-in	High (proprietary format)	Low (standard Postgres dump)	Low (standard SQL dump)
Built-in real-time	Yes	Yes (Realtime service)	No
Built-in auth	Yes	Yes, with Row Level Security	No
Pricing model	Per read, write and delete	Per plan and compute size	Per instance hour

If you are working with JSON from any of these APIs, our JSON Formatter will validate and pretty print it.