from Hacker News

Neon Postgres vs. Supabase

by TheAnkurTyagi on 8/12/24, 11:36 AM with 47 comments

  • by ko_pivot on 8/13/24, 11:24 PM

    While you can use Supabase as simply a Postgres provider, the more interesting comparison IMO is to other backend-as-a-service providers. Supabase used to call themselves a “Firebase alternative” but at this point they have surpassed Firebase in almost every way, in my view.

  • by roberttod on 8/13/24, 11:58 PM

    Do these providers really bring enough value to use them over a colocated managed db? (Not just the same region, but subnet etc)

    I was under the impression for quite some time that it wasn't that bad to have 2-3ms latencies compared to a co-located DB which is typically <1ms. However, we recently switched from Neon to a colocated, managed db and there was a huge improvement. Some of our queries were executing sequentially (due to our ORM, Prisma), and so what was a 3 second transaction was reduced to only 1 second. Yes this could be rearchitected better, but it illustrates a major floor in my mind for these companies providing only a DB.

    Managed vs. unmanaged is a massive difference and would be worth it. But these days I was under the impression most hosting companies also offer managed DBs.

  • by eashish93 on 8/14/24, 6:21 AM

    Supabase can't become firebase alternative, if they do not introduce pay per hour pricing model. Their plan starts at $25/month (their free plan is shit). Even their auth is not free unlike firebase which has everything almost free to start.

  • by re-thc on 8/13/24, 11:34 PM

    What is a CPU?

    If it's AWS hosted for example it can range from a t2 (low end) to c7a (high end) and have huge performance impacts. How will this change over time?

    It's weird that pricing is based on CPU but it's never defined. And how do we compare between offerings when that much is not obvious?

  • by alexnewman on 8/13/24, 11:36 PM

    I tried using supabase to back a vercel project. It was far too slow so we switched back to postgresql included with vercel. Turns out that was neon under the hood. The project is called webtm.io. It's opensource so you should be able to see this in history.

  • by someoneontenet on 8/13/24, 11:17 PM

    Seems weird to compare them since I see them as complimentary services.

  • by qaq on 8/13/24, 11:13 PM

    what is the largest node size Neon will scale to ?