Neon vs Supabase: Honest Comparison from 3 Months in Production
Rebooter.S
3 min read
I spent the last three months moving our startup from AWS RDS to serverless databases. Tried both Neon and Supabase in production. Here’s the real deal—no marketing fluff, just what I learned the hard way.
The Short Version
Two options dominate this space: Neon and Supabase. Both promise serverless PostgreSQL. Both say you’ll never provision again. But they’re different products for different needs.
Pick wrong, and you’ll deal with slow queries, surprise bills, or both. Let me help you avoid that.
Neon: The Branching Thing
Neon’s main feature is database branching. Like Git, but for your database. Create a branch, test your migration, merge back to production. No downtime.
We needed this last quarter. Major schema change—new table with foreign keys across three existing tables. Old setup meant 2 AM deployment or praying nothing broke. With Neon, I branched, tested with real data, promoted. Done.
Read queries are fast. Under 50ms for most operations. Writes take longer because distributed, but we haven’t hit walls.
Free tier? Actually usable. 0.5 GB, one project, three branches. Enough for side projects.
One complaint: provisioning branches takes 30-60 seconds. Can’t use it for automated testing pipelines without workarounds. Built a caching layer because of this.
Supabase: The Full Stack
Supabase is Firebase for PostgreSQL people. You get database, auth, realtime, edge functions—all in one.
Realtime is legit. Built a collaborative dashboard in ten minutes. No WebSocket code. Just pointed Supabase at our frontend.
Auth saved us a week. Email/password, OAuth, magic links. All there.
But the pricing got us. Free tier looks great—500 MB, 2 GB bandwidth, 50k MAU auth. Then you grow and it gets expensive fast. $25/month per project. We hit limits at 50k MAU and the bill jumped.
Head-to-Head
| Feature | Neon | Supabase |
|---|---|---|
| Database branching | Yes | No |
| Built-in auth | No | Yes |
| Realtime subscriptions | No | Yes |
| Self-hosting option | No | Yes |
| Free tier storage | 0.5 GB | 500 MB |
| Read latency (p95) | 45ms | 80ms |
| Write capacity | 500/sec | 500/sec |
Pricing Comparison
| Tier | Neon | Supabase |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 |
| Pro | $69/mo | $25/mo |
| Team | $239/mo | $599/mo |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom |
Our bill dropped from $120 (RDS) to $45 with Neon. Same workload.
Supabase had surprise costs—$30 overage on realtime bandwidth first month.
The Numbers
Ran benchmarks on both. Same workload: 10k queries per minute, five tables with joins.
Neon won on reads. p95 latency 45ms vs Supabase’s 80ms. Writes were similar—both handled 500/second fine.
We’re read-heavy (80% of traffic). Neon made sense.
When to Choose What
Pick Neon if you just want PostgreSQL without the hassle, need branching, care about read performance, want predictable bills.
Pick Supabase if you need auth + realtime out of the box, building fast and don’t want to piece together services, coming from Firebase, want to self-host.
What I’d Do Different
Honestly? Start with Supabase for MVP. We needed auth and realtime badly. Then migrate to Neon once things stabilized. Better performance, better pricing.
That’s what we’re doing now. Supabase for the realtime stuff, Neon for the main database. No rule says you have to pick one.
Your call. What’s your workload look like?