supabase
The whole Postgres-backed app platform, running on your own server.
What it is
Supabase is a backend platform built around an ordinary PostgreSQL database. On top of Postgres it adds authentication, auto-generated REST and realtime APIs, file storage, edge functions and a dashboard, so an app gets the pieces it needs without assembling each one from a different vendor.
Self-hosting means running the same Docker Compose stack the hosted product is built from: Postgres, PostgREST, GoTrue for auth, Realtime, Storage, Kong as the API gateway and Studio as the dashboard. It is a lot of moving parts, but they ship in one compose file and the project treats this as a supported path rather than an afterthought.
It suits developers who like the Supabase API but want the data on their own hardware, whether for compliance, for cost at scale, or simply because they would rather not have a managed service between them and their database.
Why we recommend it
You get Postgres, not a proprietary store
Every table, row and query is plain PostgreSQL. If you leave the platform you take a normal database dump with you, which is a very different proposition from a backend where the data model belongs to the vendor.
One stack covers auth, API, storage and functions
Instead of wiring a separate auth provider, an object store and an API layer, you configure one compose file and get all of them behind a single gateway.
Hosted and self-hosted share an architecture
The Docker setup reflects how the company runs the product, so features arrive on both. It is not a stripped-down community edition with the interesting parts removed.
Client code survives either direction
Code written against a hosted project generally works against your own instance by changing the URL and key, so migrating in, or back out, is a configuration change rather than a rewrite.
How it scores
These are our editorial ratings, not benchmark results. We score on how the project behaves in practice — how long it takes to get running, how good the documentation is, how responsive the maintainers are, and how well it holds up over time. The licence and star count above are read from GitHub and are a snapshot.
Pros and cons
Strengths
- Built on stock PostgreSQL, so nothing about your data is proprietary
- Auth, REST, realtime, storage and edge functions in one supported stack
- Studio dashboard included, so the database can be managed without a SQL client
- Client libraries for JavaScript, Python, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin and more
- Very active project with a large user base and fast-moving documentation
Trade-offs
- Self-hosting is meaningfully harder than the hosted product: the compose stack is a dozen containers including Kong, and you own the upgrades and backups
- Documentation is written primarily for the hosted service, so some guides assume behaviour or limits that differ when you run it yourself
- Realtime and Storage add services that need their own monitoring and storage planning
- Managed conveniences such as read replicas, point-in-time recovery and the log explorer are not part of the self-hosted stack
How to get it
One-line install
Prefer the terminal? Copy a command and you are done.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/supabase/supabase && cd supabase/docker && cp .env.example .env && docker compose up -d
Source and documentation
At a glance
| Category | Self-hosted |
|---|---|
| Licence | Apache 2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript |
| GitHub stars | 109,018 |
| Repository | supabase/supabase |
Licence and star count were read from the GitHub API when this page was generated and are a snapshot. Check the repository for the current figure and the authoritative licence text.
Other Self-hosted tools
We are not affiliated with supabase or its maintainers. We list it because it is genuinely useful and genuinely free. If you plan to build a commercial product on top of it, read the licence on the repository first.