Rebase vs Firebase
Firebase provides an incredible initial developer experience, but its NoSQL foundation inevitably creates deep technical debt for relational data apps. See why teams migrate to Rebase for Postgres-powered schemas, zero lock-in, and instant Admin Panels.
NoSQL Chaos vs Relational Postgres
The Firebase Pain
Because Firebase is NoSQL, your data is not inherently relational. To perform operations roughly equivalent to a SQL JOIN, developers have to dangerously denormalize/duplicate their data across collections, relying on complex Cloud Functions to keep data synced when it updates.
How Rebase Solves This
Rebase uses true relational PostgreSQL.
- Store a user's name exactly once. Update it once.
- Perform fast, complex joins automatically without writing arbitrary sync-scripts.
- Stop fighting your database and let Postgres handle data integrity automatically.
Barebones Scaffolding vs Real Admin UI
The Firebase Pain
The Firebase Console is purely a developer tool. If you need a dashboard for your customer success team or content writers, you must manually build an entire admin panel from scratch, connecting it separately to the Firebase SDK.
How Rebase Solves This
Rebase automatically generates a stunning, production-ready React Admin Panel.
- Instant generation of tables, kanban boards, and formatted edit screens.
- Safe to give access to non-technical teammates using granular RBAC.
- Customize with your own React components where needed.
Google Cloud vs Deployment Freedom
The Firebase Pain
Firebase is entirely proprietary to Google Cloud. If you decide to move, migrating data out of Firestore to a different database architecture is a massive, costly engineering endeavor.
How Rebase Solves This
Rebase is fully open-source and natively Docker-ready.
- Host on AWS, DigitalOcean, Fly.io, Railway, or barefoot metal servers.
- Under the hood, your data is merely a standard PostgreSQL database, giving you eternal interoperability with BI tools everywhere.
Upgrade to Relational Power.
Rebase and Firebase, answered
Can I migrate from Firestore to Rebase?
The data can move, but it is a genuine migration rather than a connection change: Firestore is a document store and Rebase is relational, so collections of nested documents have to be modelled as tables and foreign keys. That modelling work is the migration. What you get for it is SQL, joins, transactions and constraints — which is usually the reason people leave in the first place.
Does Rebase have realtime like Firestore?
Yes — realtime subscriptions over WebSocket, driven by changes in Postgres, and delivered under the same row-level security as every other read. That last part is the difference worth knowing: a subscription cannot see rows the subscriber is not allowed to read, because the policy is enforced by the database rather than by the code that set up the listener.
What replaces Firebase Auth?
Rebase ships authentication with JWT and Google OAuth, and the signed-in user's identity is what row-level security policies are written against. The practical difference is that your users live in your own Postgres, in a table you can query and join against, rather than in a separate identity service you reach over an API.
When is Firebase the better choice?
When you are building a mobile app that has to work offline. Firebase's client SDKs and their offline persistence are genuinely excellent and there is no equivalent here. It is also the better answer if you want Google's operational scale without thinking about a database at all — the flip side of owning your Postgres is that you own your Postgres.
Why move to Postgres at all?
Usually because a query got hard. Document stores are pleasant until you need to ask a question that spans three collections, enforce that two writes happen together, or hand an analyst something they can query. Those are one-line problems in SQL and architectural problems in Firestore.
Do I have to self-host Rebase?
No. Self-host it and you own the data, the code and the machine it runs on — that is the default and it is fully supported. Or deploy the same project to Rebase Cloud, which is live with real tenants today and opening in batches while it is in private beta, priced per resource rather than per seat. Your code is identical either way; hosting is a deployment target, not a fork.
Don't take our word for it.
The comparison that matters is the one you run. Point Rebase at a Postgres database you already have and see how it holds up next to Firebase.
