Supabase vs Firebase : Evaluation of performance and development of Progressive Web Apps
Ayezabu, Amanuel Zewdie (2022)
Ayezabu, Amanuel Zewdie
2022
All rights reserved. This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2022090920032
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2022090920032
Tiivistelmä
The purpose of the thesis is to evaluate Firebase and Supabase which are platforms that provide developers with products and services with the goal of helping to build applications. The platforms were compared under different criteria such as features, performance, products, prices, and stability in order to identify the advantages and disadvantages of each platform. The evaluation was done for WeDance, a non-profit social network for dancers. It was done with the aim of providing WeDance the information required to make the decision to switch between the two platforms based on the necessities of the company.
The research was carried out by reviewing existing literature to gain proper insight on the topic. Additionally, two identical progressive web applications were built using Firebase and Supabase. The main functionality of the application was to send users daily weather reports for locations users had specified. The goal was achieved by using different back-end services such as authentication, social integration, storage, and scheduled jobs.
The results reveal that selecting a more suitable platform between the two is dependent on the use case of the project. For instance, Supabase offers a relational database, as well as full-text search capabilities which can be great for projects that make lots of queries. Firebase on the other hand offers a NoSQL database with offline support which can be great for building progressive web applications.
Furthermore, the performance test results acquired after examining the applications indicated that the application built with Supabase had a faster load speed on average. Additionally, the Supabase application was also able to sustain more consecutive requests. However, the Firebase database has a higher load threshold, but it can only be reached by incrementally increasing the request over time.
The results obtained can be used by developers and businesses to make informed decisions when picking one of these two platforms for a project. Lastly, the research could be further expanded by evaluating other aspects of Firebase and Supabase that are not thoroughly covered in this paper. For instance, the self-hosting feature of Supabase or the database scalability of Supabase.
The research was carried out by reviewing existing literature to gain proper insight on the topic. Additionally, two identical progressive web applications were built using Firebase and Supabase. The main functionality of the application was to send users daily weather reports for locations users had specified. The goal was achieved by using different back-end services such as authentication, social integration, storage, and scheduled jobs.
The results reveal that selecting a more suitable platform between the two is dependent on the use case of the project. For instance, Supabase offers a relational database, as well as full-text search capabilities which can be great for projects that make lots of queries. Firebase on the other hand offers a NoSQL database with offline support which can be great for building progressive web applications.
Furthermore, the performance test results acquired after examining the applications indicated that the application built with Supabase had a faster load speed on average. Additionally, the Supabase application was also able to sustain more consecutive requests. However, the Firebase database has a higher load threshold, but it can only be reached by incrementally increasing the request over time.
The results obtained can be used by developers and businesses to make informed decisions when picking one of these two platforms for a project. Lastly, the research could be further expanded by evaluating other aspects of Firebase and Supabase that are not thoroughly covered in this paper. For instance, the self-hosting feature of Supabase or the database scalability of Supabase.