What is Supabase?
Supabase is an open-source backend-as-a-service built on PostgreSQL. It bundles Auth, Storage, Realtime, and Edge Functions behind a single SDK so a client app can go from zero to production without hand-rolling infrastructure.
Resources
Short guides, curated links, a glossary and FAQ for Supabase and adjacent BaaS / serverless database platforms.
Short guides
Supabase vs Firebase
Both give you auth, DB, storage and functions. Supabase is relational (Postgres) and open-source; Firebase is document-based (Firestore) and Google-owned. Supabase wins on SQL and lock-in escape; Firebase wins on mobile SDK depth.
How Row Level Security works
RLS attaches a boolean SQL expression to every query. When you enable it plus GRANT the roles your policies allow, the publishable key becomes safe to ship to browsers — each request is scoped to the rows the JWT owner can see.
Reading a status page
A green dot means an endpoint is reachable. It does not guarantee your specific project is healthy — auto-pause, quota, RLS misconfig, or per-region incidents can all break your project while the platform surfaces are green.
Why CORS limits browser checks
Most platform APIs don't return permissive CORS headers for arbitrary origins, so browser checks confirm DNS/TCP/TLS handshake — not the JSON response. That's why we report reachability, not full API health.
Curated links
Official status pages
Underlying infra
Communities
Glossary
- BaaS
- Backend-as-a-Service — an integrated stack of auth, database, storage, and functions behind one SDK.
- RLS
- Row Level Security — Postgres feature that filters query results per-user via a policy expression.
- Publishable key
- The public/anon Supabase key safe to ship in a browser bundle; RLS gates access.
- Service role key
- Bypasses RLS. Server-only; never expose to clients.
- Edge Function
- Deno serverless function deployed to Supabase's edge runtime.
- Realtime
- WebSocket service streaming Postgres changes and presence.
- Supavisor
- Supabase's connection pooler for serverless workloads.
- PgBouncer
- The classic Postgres connection pooler; largely replaced by Supavisor in Supabase.
- pgvector
- Postgres extension for vector similarity search / RAG.
- PITR
- Point-In-Time Recovery — restore a database to a specific timestamp within retention.
- Firestore
- Firebase's document database — collections of documents with sub-collections.
- Security Rules
- Firebase's DSL for authorizing Firestore and Storage requests.
- Cloud Function
- Firebase / GCP serverless function; Gen-2 runs on Cloud Run.
- Cold start
- Latency added when a suspended function or DB compute has to spin up.
- Branching (Neon)
- Copy-on-write fork of a Postgres database — instant, cheap preview environments.
- Scale-to-zero
- Idle compute is suspended and only wakes on the next query.
- Vitess
- Sharding + connection-pooling layer originally built at YouTube; powers PlanetScale.
- Deploy request
- PlanetScale's non-blocking schema-change workflow, similar to a pull request.
- Keyspace
- A logical database in Vitess/PlanetScale — sharded or unsharded.
- MAU
- Monthly Active User — the metric Supabase Auth bills on.
FAQ
Is Supabase open source?
Yes. The core components (Postgres, PostgREST, GoTrue, Realtime, Storage-API) are Apache 2.0 licensed and self-hostable.
Why is my Supabase project returning 5xx while status is green?
Free-tier projects auto-pause after 7 days, quotas can be exceeded, or your own RLS policies can block requests. Check the project Reports tab first.
What's the difference between Supabase and Firebase?
Supabase is relational Postgres + open-source; Firebase is document Firestore + Google-owned. Supabase wins on SQL; Firebase wins on mobile SDKs.
Is Neon the same as Supabase?
Both use Postgres, but Neon is DB-only with branching and scale-to-zero. Supabase bundles Postgres with Auth, Storage, Realtime, and Edge Functions.
Do you store any of my Supabase credentials?
No. supabase.health is read-only — we only probe public reachability endpoints from your browser.