Tools / PostgreSQL / PostgreSQL vs Supabase
The world's most advanced open source relational database.
PostgreSQL is an open source object-relational database system with over 35 years of active development. It runs on all major operating systems and is maintained by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, a community of volunteers rather than a single company. The project releases new major versions annually; as of September 2026, PostgreSQL 19 is in beta (Beta 4), with supported stable releases including 18.6, 17.11, 16.15, 15.19, and 14.24. PostgreSQL 14 reaches end of life on November 12, 2026. The project is developed through public mailing lists, and the website includes full documentation, a feature matrix, download packages for many platforms, and details on community events such as PGConf.EU and regional PGDays.
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.