I've only just begun exploring it, but it seems like AWS Amplify is another strong alternative (just uses underlying AWS services, but with a nice CLI that ties it all together). Not open source of course, but it's striking to me that people are only referencing this project as being an alternative to Firebase - is Amplify not seen as that strong of a product?
Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
261–270 of 374 posts
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#262I've been thinking about the need for easier to use databases for a long time. I previously started a company based on selling database software, so I've seen a lot of problems in the space. I honestly most databases are too hard to use and there's been no major improvements here in the last few decades. Take Postgres. You write code in SQL, a programming language unlike any other mainstream programming language. Ins…
This is a great comment. Especially this:
> I'm hoping that Supabase is able to bring about the next-phase of databases .. by making it easy to do so
We chatted to a lot of developers at the start of this year. Most of them thought that Postgres was amazing and wanted to use it, but they still chose other options (like Firebase) because they were easier. At that point we made "database UX" our main focus.
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be wrong about the history of security work on databases (feel free to correct me!) , but I think the security model was built mostly for an age where a single DB would be used by many apps, thus access control at the DB level seemed natural to the DB admins. Today, with managed/containerized DBs and Microservices and share nothing architecture, I’ve seen most apps use their own database instance, in which case…
Not every database application is a public facing web application. Think about, for instance, a company's internal customer database (including billing, etc), accessed with internal tools. CSR/Support people need to be able to see billing status but not credit card numbers, for example. Different levels of management need to be able to generate reports, but again not get credit card numbers. For these use cases the o…
Access control gets complicated though. Maybe a column should be accessible to a user, but only under x, y, z conditions that require hundreds of lines of logic to figure out. Do you really want all that inside the db?
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#264This looks to just be the "real time" DB? How is this different from using GraphQL subscriptions via Hasura/Postgraphile, or RethinkDB?
Also, it seems like it's missing everything else that Firebase provides. Authentication, authorization, storage, hosting, etc. To me, Firebase's value prop is more than just a database.
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#265The biggest feature I will be looking for in this is a true push to android mobile devices. It looks like you can use the subscribe function for this, but I'd need an android example to get up and running quickly. Right now it seems like firebase is the only game in town for that functionality unless you want to roll your own with websockets or some sort of MQ. Google also strongly encourages use of firebase for that…
It's clear I jumped to a conclusion here and thought this would give us firebase cloud messaging, my bad.
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#266This looks to just be the "real time" DB? How is this different from using GraphQL subscriptions via Hasura/Postgraphile, or RethinkDB? Also, it seems like it's missing everything else that Firebase provides. Authentication, authorization, storage, hosting, etc. To me, Firebase's value prop is more than just a database.
I answered this over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23320443
tldr: > We've been building furiously since January but (not surprisingly) we haven't yet reached feature parity. But we will :)
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#267From what can be understood: Writing a backend with Supabase will turn into managing all these servers. Backend Server = Supabase (for realtime) + PostgREST (for REST APIs) + Serverless Functions (for business logic) + Postgres SQL database. For somebody using Firebase today, How will this solution with Supabase be simple to manage and scale ? Help me understand if I am wrong.
We plan to make the self-hosting a lot easier/simpler, it's on the roadmap. This post caught us a bit by surprise - we planned to launch later this year with better documentation and opensource suppport.
Basically: we will bundle everything into a single deploy (docker, AWS, DO, etc).
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#268There is a database management company called Superbase, the names are confusingly similar. I read a bit perplexed about Superbase being a YC company. https://www.superbase.com
There's also a Nicki Minaj song called Super Bass, although i admit that is less likely to get confused with either of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JipHEz53sU
I posted this below, but since you mention Nikki -
Funny story, Supabase was originally a placeholder name - it was a joke so that Ant (co-founder) and I could entertain each other with Nikki Minaj "Super Bass" memes while we were brainstorming.
But the name grew on us once we made the initial design. Thankfully Nikki Minaj isn't well-known amongst techies.
I hope I haven't just ruined our credibility
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#269This looks to just be the "real time" DB? How is this different from using GraphQL subscriptions via Hasura/Postgraphile, or RethinkDB? Also, it seems like it's missing everything else that Firebase provides. Authentication, authorization, storage, hosting, etc. To me, Firebase's value prop is more than just a database.
I answered this over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23320443 tldr: > We've been building furiously since January but (not surprisingly) we haven't yet reached feature parity. But we will :)
Sounds good. Would it make sense to put some info about your roadmap on your main marketing pages? There's pros and cons of that, but for positioning sake, I'd recommend it, and given that it's still an alpha, I think that mitigates the expectations of feature completeness.
Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS amiplfiy seems like its trying to do something similar
I eventually settled on Hasura but I did evaluate amplify. It looked to me like it was too complicated to break away from their db so I gave up on it (it was possible, but it felt like you had all the complexity of AWS IAM permissions, but just to access data). I didn’t go too deep so I don’t really remember the details but Hasura seemed the better approach (still a happy user of it).
Gotta say I need to take a better look at Hasura