Tools / Neon / Neon vs Supabase
Serverless Postgres with branching and autoscaling.
Neon is a backend platform built around Lakebase Postgres, a serverless Postgres database with storage-compute separation. Beyond the database itself, it includes managed authentication built on Better Auth, S3-compatible object storage that branches alongside your projects, serverless functions that run next to your data, and an AI Gateway that exposes frontier and open-source models through one API. Neon is part of the Databricks platform. Its branching feature lets you create isolated copies of your entire backend — database, storage included — the way you'd work with pull requests, which is aimed at both development workflows and coding agents. Neon provides MCP, CLI, and SDK access, and markets itself as infrastructure for app-generation agents like Replit and v0 AI. Other advertised capabilities include autoscaling, instant restore for recovering from mistakes, and vector, keyword, and hybrid search. The free plan includes 1 GB of Postgres storage per project and up to 100 projects.
Postgres plus auth, storage, and realtime — the open Firebase.
Supabase gives every project a full Postgres database and layers commonly needed backend services on top of it: authentication with Row Level Security, auto-generated REST APIs, Edge Functions, file storage, realtime data sync, and vector embedding support for AI workloads. You can use one product or all of them, and manage everything from a dashboard with a table editor, SQL editor, and RLS policy tools. It's open source (the GitHub repo shows over 111K stars) and the database is portable, so you're not locked into a proprietary data format. Client libraries exist for frameworks like React and Flutter, and the site offers starter templates including a Stripe subscriptions kit, a Next.js app with cookie-based auth, an AI chatbot template, and a LangChain starter.