Rebase vs Supabase
Supabase is a fantastic platform, but its "Firebase alternative" marketing hides the operational overhead of managing raw PostgreSQL in production. See how Rebase solves the biggest pain points developers face when scaling.
RLS without the Footgun
The Supabase Pain
PostgreSQL Row Level Security (RLS) policies are notoriously difficult to write, test, and debug. Poorly written policies destroy performance via implicit JOINs, and Supabase requires writing raw SQL for RLS policies without a visual, code-free RBAC policy builder.
How Rebase Solves This
Rebase embraces Native Postgres RLS but surrounds it with powerful tooling. Instead of writing opaque SQL, you define dynamic policies purely in TypeScript. Real-time inference generates user-friendly configuration UI.
- Built-in visual RLS policy editor.
- Define dynamic context directly in TypeScript instead of complex JOINs.
- Granular access control applied logically.
True Self-Hosting Symmetry
The Supabase Pain
Self-hosting Supabase is an infrastructure nightmare. It is a massive constellation of microservices: PostgREST (Haskell), GoTrue (Go), Realtime (Elixir), and Edge Functions (Deno). Upgrading these services independently is nearly impossible for small teams.
How Rebase Solves This
Rebase is unified. It is a single Node.js backend using standard Hono and Drizzle ORM.
- One service to deploy via Docker, Railway, Fly, or bare metal.
- Written completely in TypeScript — the language you already know.
- Tightly coupled and fully integrated without black-box binaries.
Schema-as-Code Workflow
The Supabase Pain
With Supabase, the database *is* the state. Local development, staging, and production environments quickly fall out of sync. Managing version control for RPCs, Triggers, and RLS inside raw SQL files requires extreme discipline.
How Rebase Solves This
Rebase pioneers a Git-backed hybrid approach. Your schema definitions live purely as standalone TypeScript configuration files (`/collections/products.ts`).
- The Rebase Studio uses AST manipulation to inject fields into your code safely.
- Drizzle migrations are automatically synced and deployed.
- Code is the source of truth, guaranteeing environmental parity.
Ready for a true Open-Source approach?
Rebase generates your admin panel, APIs, and SDK in minutes — right from your existing schema.
Rebase and Supabase, answered
Can I use Rebase with my existing Supabase database?
Yes. Rebase connects to any PostgreSQL database, including the one behind a Supabase project, and it reads the tables that are already there rather than insisting on its own shape. What does not travel is the part of Supabase that is not Postgres: their auth schema, edge functions and storage buckets are their implementations, so those you would be replacing rather than importing.
If both are Postgres with row-level security, what is actually different?
Where the policies come from. On Supabase you write RLS as SQL in a dashboard, and a policy that silently returns zero rows is a debugging session with no stack trace. In Rebase the policy is part of the collection definition in TypeScript and is compiled to a real Postgres policy when you migrate. The enforcement is identical — it is Postgres in both cases — but the rule lives in your repository, goes through code review, and shows up in a diff.
Isn't the Supabase dashboard already an admin panel?
It is a table editor, which is a different product. It is built for the developer: raw rows, foreign-key UUIDs, no workflow, no roles beyond database roles. Rebase generates an interface for the people who run the business — forms, media, permissions, kanban boards, and your own React components wherever the generated defaults are wrong — out of the same collection definitions that produced the API.
When is Supabase the better choice?
When you want the largest ecosystem in this category, the most third-party tutorials, or edge functions running at the CDN. Supabase is the more mature product with a much bigger community, and if nobody outside your engineering team will ever open the back office, most of what Rebase adds is weight you will not use.
How much of a rewrite is moving an app from Supabase to Rebase?
The database is the part that does not move — it is Postgres on both sides. What changes is the client: Supabase's JS client and Rebase's typed SDK are different APIs, so calls have to be rewritten, and any policy you wrote in the dashboard has to be expressed as a collection's security rules. Realistically it is a client-layer migration, not a data migration.
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 Supabase.
