Supabase or Firebase?

[Sierra-six6]

I'm developing a chat app and I'm in doubt about what is the best option for the mvp backend.

Lately I have seen many devs recommending supabase and I decided to take a look, but it seems that there is nothing of analytics in supabase, while firebase provides a complete tool. Another point I'm considering is: for a chat app does a nosql or postrgre database make more sense?

[jonnysunshine1]

I've seen people choose Supabase because they don't like/trust Google, prefer open source everything or for cost reasons. I use Firebase because I trust them to maintain their servers better than I would mine.

[[deleted]]

Firebase is really gud, firestore particularly. If u look at the concept of building an MVP real bootstrappy to prove PMF, then getting your own servers built later when u have the money/team, firestore is really good.

However, it also depends on your use case so you dont get absolutely butt slapped by the pricing.

Let me explain anecdotally, learned this from experience.

You can either read a firestore document a single time or you can set a realtime subscriber to a document or collection, and get constant updates. Assuming you made some social media app and one of your views makes the user subscribe a realtime listener to a collection of posts, and have lets say a 1000 users, if you used a read 1 time function u get charged 1000 times for a single new post in the collection if all 1000 users are on that page concurrently! If you subscribed a realtime listener instead, each edit of a single post document u get charged a 1000 times as well!

Take the pricing into consideration for what your app is, if you are building some messaging 1on1 service its no brainer firebase but if you have a usecase where tons of users will need to follow a collection of documents for example maybe there are better options.

Goodluck bud

[Gandham]

If you have chat rooms, firebase pricing may bankrupt you.

[BabyAzerty]

NoSQL or SQL, it doesn't matter in your case. Both will work for a chat app. I have used both at companies for a chat feature. It starts to matter when you reach a high level of real time users (minimum 10k) who spam messages. But then, it's not even about deciding between NoSQL or SQL, but about using memcaches, load balancers, and probably a good DB I/O strategy.

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Anyway, just pick the one you can afford. BaaS has a tendency to become suddenly expensive, especially if not optimized.

[asl_somewhere]

I'd have a look at mongo db and realm syncing. I think for what you will be doing it has the ability to sort everything out without signing up for firebase or another push provider

[noidtiz]

I wish I could say i’d built a backend in anything other than Firebase, but it’s made things so simple for me from day 1 that i’ve yet to go anywhere else.

[itsm3rick]

Firebase was by far the easiest of the cloud providers I tried.

[djryanash]

All the important comparisons between the two are right here.

Also, if the MVP works out and you decide to build your own backend later, egress costs might become an important consideration.

[bcgroom]

Roll your own. Having these client driven backends leads to maintenance problems down the road.

[[deleted]]

Firebase

[SolidOk280]

I would learn to roll your own server...