Reactive backends push on every change, so a chatty subscription is a bandwidth line, not a CPU one
Easy to miss when modelling costs against requests per second
Check what live queries re-send when one row changes
Idle: Firebase, Convex and Neon cost approximately nothing when unused
A Supabase Pro project bills compute by the hour regardless of traffic
Anything self-hosted bills you for the machine
For side projects and staging this dominates everything else
Realistic migration paths
Convex to Postgres is the hard one, plan it before you need it
npx convex export gives a zip of JSONL per table that loads into Postgres cleanly enough
The work is in the application
Put a repository layer between your components and Convex early, so reactive queries become one seam not hundreds
Do it while the app is small; retrofitting later is most of the migration cost
Firebase to anything starts with the export format, the one genuinely closed artefact here
The managed Firestore export writes a format only Firestore imports
In practice you paginate collections through the Admin SDK and write your own JSON
Fine at gigabytes, painful at terabytes
Budget separately for translating security rules into row-level security or middleware
Supabase to plain Postgres is the easy case and the reference point
pg_dump, restore anywhere, replace supabase-js with your query builder, replace GoTrue with an auth provider
Weeks, not quarters, and that gap is the entire content of the exit-cost column
Adding a sync engine later is the underrated option
Electric and Zero sit beside Postgres rather than replacing it
"Start on Neon and Drizzle, add Zero when the UI needs to feel instant" is a real sequence, not a rewrite
None of the all-in-one platforms support that shape
What is convex vs alternatives: reactive backend platforms compared?
Convex vs alternatives: reactive backend platforms compared
On toolweight, Convex vs alternatives: reactive backend platforms compared means the 11 tools benchmarked on this page, Convex, Supabase, Firebase, Appwrite, PocketBase, InstantDB, Nhost, TriplitTR, Zero, ElectricSQL, Neon + Drizzle, judged on the same 26 fields, from the same sources, on the same date. The question it exists to answer: What are the best alternatives to Convex, and how hard is each one to leave?
How does toolweight compare these?
Every cell written from vendor docs, pricing pages and hands-on SDK knowledge, then tagged with provenance
vendor-claimed cells come off a specific docs or pricing URL, dated to when last plausibly true
inferred cells are judgement calls or values reasoned from adjacent facts
Where a fact is genuinely unpublished, the cell is null and renders as an em dash rather than a guess
Prices are the lowest paid tier, monthly, in USD, excluding usage
Exit cost is the field this page exists for
A 1-5 judgement score, lower is better
Measures one thing: how much application code you rewrite to leave, assuming data is already extracted
Deliberately ignores how good, how cheap, or how likely to survive the platform is
A high score is not a verdict against a tool, it is the size of the bet you are placing
The five rungs are defined in the column tooltip; each score's reasoning sits in that tool's cell note
Cite this comparisonCC-BY-4.0 · verified 2026-07-20
Convex ships fastest but is among the hardest to leave; Supabase, Nhost and Neon keep your data in ordinary Postgres. — toolweight, https://toolweight.com/compare/convex-alternatives, verified 2026-07-20. Data from toolweight (https://toolweight.com), licensed CC-BY-4.0.
Frequently asked questions
Is Convex a good idea if I might need to leave later?
Only if you price the exit now
No SQL surface, so every query, mutation and subscription is rewritten on the way out
The reactive render model has no drop-in equivalent
Scores 4 of 5 on our exit-cost ladder
If the codebase may outlive the decision and you are unsure, start on Postgres
Does self-hosting Convex remove the lock-in?
No, it removes vendor risk, a different problem
convex-backend is open under FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0 with documented self-hosting, so Convex disappearing cannot strand you
But self-hosted Convex still speaks the Convex query API
The cost of moving to something that is not Convex is unchanged
Exit cost and vendor risk are separate columns for a reason
Supabase or Convex for a new TypeScript app?
Convex if the app is realtime-shaped and the team is small: faster first version, no subscription plumbing
Supabase if you want data in Postgres, need raw SQL, or expect BI tools to read the same database
The productivity gap is real but narrowing
The portability gap is not narrowing at all
What is the actual difference between Zero and ElectricSQL?
Direction and scope
Electric streams read-only shapes out of Postgres over HTTP, says nothing about writes, you keep your own API
Zero syncs queries into a client cache and handles writes through custom mutators against your Postgres
Zero owns more of the loop
Electric is the smaller commitment; Zero gives more in return
Is Firebase still a reasonable default in 2026?
For consumer mobile apps that will never migrate, yes: SDKs, offline persistence and Google's operations are hard to beat
For anything else it is the worst exit on this page
No self-host, a proprietary rules language, an export format only Firestore reads
A document model that shapes your schema around its query engine
SupabaseManaged Postgres with auth, storage, realtime and edge functions around it.74.6