Supabase vs Firebase for a business app

Supabase vs Firebase is usually argued on speed and price, and for a business app neither one decides it. Every build here runs on Supabase, and the reason is the shape of the data: a business is companies, people, bookings and invoices that point at each other, and a relational database stores that as it is.

Firebase's main database, Firestore, stores documents. That suits a chat app or a feed, where each item mostly stands on its own. It gets awkward when a question crosses records, such as which of a company's clients booked twice last month and still have not paid. In Postgres, the database under Supabase, that is one query. In a document store it is usually several reads plus code that stitches the answer together, and Firestore bills every document it reads.

On security the two fail the same way. Both put a public key in the browser on purpose: Firebase's config is meant to be public, and so is Supabase's anon key. What protects the data is the rules, security rules on Firebase and row level security on Supabase. An app built by prompting that skips them is open on either platform, which is why it is the second item on the vibe coding security checklist, and why a key setting is not a lock, as verify_jwt is not authentication found out.

Where Supabase pulls ahead is that its rules are SQL, written beside the tables they protect. Team Feel, a platform where companies rate colleagues across departments, went from 47 policies to 77 in a five-week rebuild, each one a plain statement about which company a row belongs to. Firestore rules live in their own file, in their own language, away from the data they guard. The rebuild is written up in Supabase RLS in a multi-tenant rebuild.

The last reason is the handover. Every project here ends with the client owning the repository and the accounts. A Supabase project is a standard Postgres database, so leaving means a database dump that any Postgres host accepts. Firestore's data model and rules exist only on Google's platform, so leaving Firebase means rewriting the data layer.

Firebase is still the faster start for a mobile app that mostly holds one user's own data, with push notifications and offline sync built in. Software a business runs on has companies, roles and money in it, and that data is relational. The builds behind this choice are on the product and SaaS page.