Supabase vs Neon (2026): Pricing, Features and When to Pick Each

Supabase and Neon both give you managed Postgres, and on October 2, 2026, both of them made news. Neon doubled its free storage to 1 GB per project. Supabase announced it's acquiring Turso, the SQLite company. So which one should sit under your app?

They're built for different jobs. Supabase gives every project its own always-on Postgres instance and bundles auth, storage, realtime and functions around it. Neon splits storage from compute, so a database can branch in seconds and scale to zero when nobody's using it. Neon has also been part of Databricks since 2025.

This guide compares the two on pricing (with the hourly math worked out), architecture, branching, scaling and backend extras. If you only care about reporting, jump to running dashboards and analytics on each.

TL;DR: Pick Supabase if you want the database, auth, storage and realtime on one platform with a predictable bill. Pick Neon if you want serverless Postgres with instant data branches and pay-per-hour compute. By our math, a database with 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of data costs less on Neon if it's active under about 505 hours a month, and less on Supabase if it runs 24/7.

Supabase vs Neon at a glance

Prices and limits are from the Supabase and Neon pricing pages and docs, retrieved October 8, 2026. On Neon, one CU (compute unit) is about 4 GB of RAM plus matching CPU.

What is the main difference between Supabase and Neon?

Supabase runs each project on a dedicated Postgres instance with a backend wrapped around it, while Neon separates storage from compute so the database itself is serverless. Almost every difference below comes from that split. For context: as of June 2026, Supabase says nearly 10 million developers build on it (Supabase, "Supabase Series F"), and Neon's architecture now also powers Databricks Lakebase.

On Supabase, each project is a full Postgres database on a compute size you pick, from Micro to 16XL. It doesn't autoscale, and paid projects aren't paused for inactivity. Around that database, Supabase runs auth, file storage, realtime subscriptions, edge functions and auto-generated APIs. You get a complete backend from one dashboard.

Neon works differently. Its compute is stateless and streams the write-ahead log (WAL) to a set of safekeepers, which make each commit durable once a quorum acknowledges it. Pageservers rebuild data pages from that log, and object storage keeps the history (Neon, architecture overview). Because storage lives apart from compute, nothing is lost when compute stops. So Neon can suspend an idle database after five minutes, create a branch by pointing at a moment in that history instead of copying data, and bill compute by the hour. A Supabase project is closer to a Postgres server with a backend attached, while Neon is Postgres sold as a metered service.

How does Supabase pricing compare with Neon pricing?

As of October 2026, Supabase Pro starts at $25 a month and includes $10 of compute credits. Neon's paid plans have no base fee. Launch bills $0.106 per CU-hour plus $0.35 per GB-month of storage (Supabase pricing; Neon pricing). Supabase charges for capacity you provision, while Neon charges for the hours your compute actually runs.

That makes a simple "which is cheaper?" hard to answer without a workload. So here's one.

A worked example: 2 GB of RAM, 10 GB of data

Assume a small production app: about 2 GB of RAM, 10 GB of data, egress and monthly active users inside the included allowances, and a 730-hour month.

Supabase Pro with Small compute (2 GB RAM, shared CPU):

• Pro plan: $25.00
• Small compute: $15.00
• Compute credits: −$10.00
• Disk: 2 GB over the 8 GB included × $0.125 = $0.25
• Total: about $30.25 a month, whether the database is busy or idle

Neon Launch at 0.5 CU (about 2 GB RAM):

• Compute: 0.5 CU × $0.106 = $0.053 per active hour
• Storage: 10 GB × $0.35 = $3.50
• Always on (730 hours): about $42.19 a month
• Active 12 hours a day: about $22.85 a month
• Active 8 hours a day: about $16.40 a month

The two lines cross at about 505 active hours a month, or roughly 16.6 hours a day. Below that, Neon costs less. Above it, Supabase does.

Smaller databases flip the result. At 1 GB of RAM with the same 10 GB of data, Supabase Pro with Micro compute comes to about $25.25 a month, while Neon at 0.25 CU costs about $22.85 even if it never sleeps. (That matches the 12-hour figure above: half the compute for twice the hours.)

One catch: anything that queries the database keeps Neon's compute awake. Health checks, uptime monitors and frequent cron jobs all count as active hours, so a database pinged every minute never scales to zero. Check what's hitting yours before you count on idle time.

Our take: Price comes down to one number: how many hours a month your database is busy. If it sits idle at night and on weekends, as internal tools, single-time-zone B2B apps and preview environments do, Neon's meter wins. Busy around the clock at 2 GB of RAM or more? Supabase's flat instance price is lower and easier to forecast.

Costs that can change the answer

• Point-in-time recovery. Supabase charges $100 a month per 7 days of retention and requires Small compute or larger. Neon's restore history on paid plans is billed at $0.20 per GB-month of retained changes. For most small apps, that's a much smaller line item.
• Compliance. Neon's November 2025 pricing post notes that SOC 2, HIPAA, SSO, Private Link and SLAs moved into the Scale plan in September 2025 (Neon, "Major compute price reduction on Neon"). Scale compute costs $0.222 per CU-hour, about double Launch. On Supabase, SOC 2 reports and SSO start at Team ($599 a month), and HIPAA is a paid add-on.
• Free tiers. Neon's 100 free CU-hours per project cover about 400 active hours at 0.25 CU, across up to 100 projects. Supabase's free plan keeps two projects running full time but pauses them after a week with no activity.
• CPU. Supabase's Micro, Small and Medium sizes run on shared CPU. A Neon CU bundles CPU with about 4 GB of RAM. Treat RAM-for-RAM comparisons as close, not exact.

Branching and preview environments compared

Neon's branches are copy-on-write, so a new branch includes your data and can start from any point inside your restore window without copying it. Supabase's docs say "each branch is a separate environment with its own Supabase instance," and those branches start empty by default (Supabase, branching docs).

On Neon, a branch is a pointer into storage history. That makes it practical to test a migration against real production data, give every pull request its own database, or let an AI agent experiment without touching the main branch. Free and Launch include 10 branches per project, and Scale includes 25. Extra branches cost $1.50 per branch-month.

Branches on Supabase are heavier. Each one is a full Supabase environment with its own auth, storage and API credentials, and the GitHub integration creates one for every pull request, then deletes it when the PR is merged or closed. Data comes from seed files or an "Include data" option in the dashboard. The cost is $0.01344 an hour, or about $9.81 for a branch left running all month.

Verdict: Neon for fast, data-rich database branches. Supabase if each preview should be a fully separate backend instance with its own auth, storage and API credentials.

Scaling, connections and high availability

Neon autoscales compute up to 16 CU (about 64 GB of RAM) and suspends idle compute after five minutes. Its docs say a suspended database "reactivates automatically within a few hundred milliseconds" (Neon, scale-to-zero docs). Paid Supabase projects don't autoscale or sleep. Instead, you pick a fixed size, from Micro up to 16XL with 64 vCPUs and 256 GB of RAM.

Is a few hundred milliseconds a problem? For a dashboard or an internal tool, rarely. For a user-facing API that expects consistent first-request latency, it can be. Neon's paid plans let you lengthen the timeout or turn scale-to-zero off, and that's the setting the always-on price above assumes.

Connection handling differs too. On Neon, PgBouncer runs in transaction mode and accepts up to 10,000 client connections. Direct max_connections grows with compute size, from 104 at 0.25 CU to 839 at 2 CU (Neon, connection pooling docs). Supabase's pooler allows 200 clients on Micro and up to 12,000 on 16XL (Supabase, compute and disk docs).

Both companies are still building out high availability. Neon's own docs list high availability on Neon as "coming soon," though it's available on Databricks Lakebase (Neon, "Neon and Lakebase"). Supabase's answer is Multigres, which runs three Postgres nodes across availability zones and promotes a replica in seconds if one fails. It's "in private alpha, by invite" and meant for testing, not production workloads (Supabase, Select 2026).

Backend features beyond the database

Supabase bundles Auth, Storage, Realtime, Edge Functions, Cron, Queues and auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs, and its free plan includes 50,000 monthly active users. Neon's full backend, including Auth, Object Storage, Functions, an AI Gateway and a Data API, became generally available on September 18, 2026 (Neon changelog). Storage, Functions and the gateway run in four AWS regions so far. The Supabase stack is older and has far more production mileage.

Neon's additions are worth knowing about, though. Users from Neon Auth, a managed version of Better Auth, live in a neon_auth schema inside your own database. It covers up to 60,000 MAU on Free and up to 1 million on paid plans (Neon pricing). The Neon Data API exposes a PostgREST-style REST interface secured by row-level security and grants. Neon's S3-compatible Object Storage branches along with your database.

Realtime is the clear gap. Neon's backend list doesn't include a Realtime service like Supabase's, and its pooled connections don't support LISTEN/NOTIFY either, so if live subscriptions are central to your product, Supabase is the simpler choice.

Verdict: Supabase if you want one mature backend today. Neon if you mainly want Postgres and are happy to bring your own pieces, or you like keeping auth data inside your database.

How do Databricks and AI agents change the decision?

For AI-built apps, pick Neon when agents create lots of short-lived databases, and Supabase when they build full apps that need sign-in and storage. By each company's latest count, most new databases on both come from AI tools, but the companies are heading in different directions: Neon into Databricks, Supabase toward a bigger independent backend. In May 2025, Databricks agreed to acquire Neon for a reported $1 billion (CNBC via NBC New York, May 14, 2025). Its press release said "over 80 percent of the databases provisioned on Neon were created automatically by AI agents" (Databricks newsroom). In June 2026, Supabase said more than 60% of its new databases are launched by AI tools (Supabase, "Supabase Series F").

Since the deal, Neon's architecture has become the foundation of Databricks Lakebase (Neon, "Neon and Lakebase"), which went generally available on AWS on February 3, 2026 (Databricks, "Databricks Lakebase is now Generally Available"). Neon's docs now describe the same database running on both Neon and Databricks. Neon also cut compute prices in November 2025 (Neon, "Major compute price reduction on Neon"): Launch went from $0.14 to $0.106 per CU-hour, and Scale from $0.26 to $0.222.

Supabase has grown quickly too. In October 2026 it said it is "already launching over one million databases per week," and announced it is acquiring Turso, which runs SQLite at large scale (Supabase, "Supabase is acquiring Turso"). In the 2026 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 7.7% of developers who answered the database question used Supabase, and 57.9% used PostgreSQL (Stack Overflow, 2026 survey). Neon isn't listed.

In practice, if an agent spins up many short-lived databases, Neon's 100 free projects and scale-to-zero keep idle ones close to free. If an agent builds a full app that needs sign-in and file uploads on day one, Supabase already has those pieces. TechCrunch's October 2025 coverage named Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Cursor and Claude Code among Supabase's users.

How do you run dashboards and analytics on Supabase or Neon?

On either platform, connect your BI tool with a read-only role and keep heavy queries off the primary, ideally on a read replica. Neon's docs recommend replicas for offloading "analytics and reporting workloads" (Neon, read replicas). They share the primary's storage and can scale to zero, so a 0.5 CU replica (about 2 GB of RAM) used 8 hours a day adds about $12.90 a month, or about $38.69 if it runs around the clock. Supabase replicas run at the primary's compute size with 1.25x its disk. In Supabase's own billing example, a Small replica (2 GB) adds about $16.25 a month (Supabase, read replica billing).

Whichever you pick, a few rules keep reporting from slowing your app down:

• Use a read-only role. A dashboard tool never needs write access to production.
• On Supabase, connect through the Session pooler. Direct connections are IPv6 unless you buy the IPv4 add-on. The shared pooler is IPv4 on every plan, and session mode (port 5432) supports prepared statements (Supabase, connecting to Postgres).
• On Neon, point heavy queries at a read replica. Use the replica's own connection string, so long aggregations never compete with app traffic.
• Cache or pre-aggregate the expensive queries. Our guide to analytics without a data warehouse covers replicas, row-level security and caching in more depth.

Draxlr, which publishes this guide, is a partner of both platforms, listed in Supabase's partner catalog and Neon's integration guides. Setting up a dashboard tool looks nearly the same on each: a read-only role plus a connection string. The only real difference is the network path. On Supabase, we point users at the Session pooler because hosted tools reach it over IPv4, while on Neon the standard connection string (or a read replica's) with sslmode=require works as is. Our guides to building Supabase dashboards and building Neon dashboards walk through each step.

Which should you choose: Supabase or Neon?

Choose Supabase when you want a complete backend from one provider. Choose Neon when you want serverless Postgres that branches with your data and bills by the hour. The lists below cover the edge cases.

Choose Supabase if:

• You want auth, storage, realtime and functions from the same provider as your database
• Your database is busy more than ~505 hours a month at 2 GB of RAM, so a fixed instance price works in your favor
• You want each preview environment to be a fully separate backend instance with its own credentials
• You'd rather pick an instance size than tune autoscaling limits

Choose Neon if:

• Your workload has idle hours, or you run many small databases (the free plan alone allows 100 projects)
• Testing migrations against real data matters to you
• You want pay-per-hour compute with no base fee and cheaper point-in-time restore
• You're on Databricks, or expect to bring app data into a lakehouse later, since the same Postgres also runs as Lakebase inside Databricks

Both are plain Postgres underneath, so your schema, SQL and most tools work the same on either. If you only use the database, moving between them is a dump-and-restore job. Moving off Supabase Auth, Storage or RLS policies that call auth.uid() takes real work. Comparing reporting options for one of them? See our roundups of Supabase reporting tools and Neon reporting tools.

FAQs

1. Is Neon cheaper than Supabase?

It depends on how many hours your compute runs. At October 2026 list prices, a database with 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of data costs about $30.25 a month on Supabase Pro with Small compute. On Neon Launch at 0.5 CU, it costs $3.50 for storage plus $0.053 per active hour. Neon is cheaper below about 505 active hours a month, and Supabase is cheaper around the clock.

2. Does Supabase scale to zero like Neon?

No. Paid Supabase projects run on a fixed-size instance that stays on, and Supabase pauses free projects after a week of inactivity. Neon suspends idle compute after five minutes by default and wakes it within a few hundred milliseconds. On Neon's paid plans, you can lengthen that timeout or turn scale-to-zero off.

3. Is Neon still independent after the Databricks acquisition?

No. Databricks agreed to acquire Neon in May 2025, for about $1 billion according to CNBC. Neon still runs as its own developer platform. Its technology also powers Databricks Lakebase, which went generally available on AWS in February 2026. Neon's docs describe the same Postgres running on both Neon and Databricks.

4. Does Neon have auth and storage like Supabase?

Yes. Neon's backend, including Auth, Object Storage, Functions and an AI Gateway, became generally available on September 18, 2026. Neon Auth is managed Better Auth, free for up to 60,000 monthly active users. Supabase's Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions are older and more widely used, and Neon doesn't list a Realtime equivalent.

5. Which is better for AI agents and vibe-coding tools?

Both are popular with AI builders. In May 2025, Databricks said over 80% of Neon databases were created by AI agents. Supabase says more than 60% of its new databases come from AI tools and that it launches over a million a week. Neon fits agents that create many short-lived databases. Supabase fits agent-built apps that need sign-in and storage.

6. Can I connect a BI or dashboard tool to Supabase or Neon?

Yes. Both are standard Postgres, so any Postgres-compatible BI tool can connect. On Supabase, use the Session pooler on port 5432, which works over IPv4 and supports prepared statements. On Neon, use a read replica's connection string, since replicas share storage and can scale to zero. Use a read-only role on both.

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