Is Backend-As-A-Service (BaaS) Enterprise-Ready? A Hands-On Review of Convex and Supabase

What is BaaS and Why Consider It?

In the landscape of modern application development, Backend as a Service (BaaS) platforms have become invaluable tools. By providing pre-built backend infrastructure for data management, authentication, cloud functions, and more, BaaS solutions promise to enable development teams to significantly accelerate application development and focus primarily on business domain logic and user experience, rather than building and maintaining complex backend systems from scratch.

The promised advantages of adopting a BaaS include:

• Rapid Development: Enabling quick prototyping and launching of applications.
• Reduced Complexity: Eliminating the need to manage servers, infrastructure, or scalability concerns.
• Built-in Security: Providing ready-made solutions for authentication, authorization, and compliance.
• Cost Efficiency: Potentially reducing backend maintenance costs significantly.
• Scalability: Offering effortless scaling to meet user growth.

Essentially, the goal is to „Spend less time managing your backend, and more time delighting your users“.

For enterprise companies leveraging these inherent benefits of BaaS can be a strategic advantage. Tasked with delivering efficient and scalable solutions, selecting the appropriate infrastructure is a critical decision influenced by factors such as support for enterprise development, open-source availability, self-hosting capabilities, and the overall developer experience. Therefore, BaaS are an increasingly popular option where Convex and Supabase stand out as prominent BaaS providers often considered as alternatives to traditional platforms like Firebase due to its open source characteristics.

Moving Beyond the „Why“: Comparing Prominent Providers

When evaluating BaaS providers like Convex and Supabase, it is essential to understand their core differences and similarities without delving excessively into detailed technical specifics. Both platforms share common strengths such as ACID compliance and robust TypeScript/JavaScript framework integration, they share support for vector databases which is becoming increasingly important in AI-driven applications. Their distinct architectural philosophies cater to different developer profiles and project requirements.

Database Approach:

Supabase builds upon PostgreSQL, a robust, widely-adopted relational database technology. This choice benefits teams familiar with SQL, leveraging extensive community-driven tooling and existing knowledge.

Conversely, Convex employs a custom-built transactional document store accessible exclusively through TypeScript functions. This abstraction simplifies database interactions and reduces the complexity typically associated with database tuning and management while hiding database implementation and customization.

Realtime Capabilities:

Convex natively integrates realtime functionality with minimal setup, automatically managing client subscriptions and ensuring seamless UI updates.

Supabase also supports realtime updates but requires manual subscription and explicit frontend handling, potentially adding complexity.

Serverless and Backend Logic:

Backend logic in Supabase is typically implemented via TypeScript Edge Functions using the Deno runtime, invoked through REST APIs. Additionally, if desired a REST API is automatically generated from the created tables and made accessible to your clients without the need to write a single line of code.

Convex, on the other hand, utilizes TypeScript functions (queries, mutations, actions) within a Node.js runtime environment, streamlining development and closely aligning with frontend development paradigms familiar to React and TypeScript developers.

Authentication and Authorization:

Supabase offers an integrated authentication solution with built-in email/password and social logins, managing authorization through SQL-based Row-Level Security policies. It also comes with ready-to-use frontend components to manage user sign-in and sign-up.

Convex instead integrates seamlessly with external authentication providers, implementing authorization directly within TypeScript functions, resulting in more intuitive code-based management.

Developer Experience:

Convex is often highlighted for its superior developer experience, offering automatic schema inference, type safety, and a simplified workflow closely integrated with modern frontend frameworks.

Supabase’s developer experience is strong, especially for teams accustomed to PostgreSQL and SQL, but may involve additional manual steps for schema management and type generation.

Local Development and Self-Hosting:

Supabase boasts comprehensive local development support using Docker and extensive self-hosting capabilities, making it attractive for teams prioritizing infrastructure control and vendor lock-in mitigation.

Convex, historically reliant on a hosted environment, has recently open-sourced its backend, signalling a move towards improved local development capabilities.

Both platforms are therefore open-source and their licensing models do not limit self-hosting endeavours.

Compliance and Ecosystem:

Convex emphasizes compliance with standards such as SOC 2 Type 1, HIPAA, and GDPR, potentially appealing to enterprise-level deployments with strict regulatory requirements.

Supabase, with its open-source foundation and PostgreSQL integration, benefits from a vast and mature ecosystem.

For a comprehensive side-by-side feature comparison and further technical details, refer to the official comparison provided by Convex.

Platform evaluation and assessment

To assess the practical utility and functionality of these BaaS platforms, we conducted a rapid development project—a Scrum Poker application—during a brief hackathon where two developers created the same application with one BaaS platform in each case. This exercise provided insights into each platform’s ease of use, feature completeness, and overall developer experience under realistic, time-constrained conditions while implementing a real-world project which can be publicly provided in the nearer future.

During the hackathon, we gathered the following key observations:

• Rapid Development: Both platforms facilitated quick prototyping, allowing us to implement core functionalities such as user authentication, real-time updates, and data persistence within a short timeframe.
• Developer Experience: Convex’s TypeScript-centric approach and automatic type safety provided a seamless development experience, particularly for frontend developers. Supabase’s reliance on SQL and PostgreSQL offered flexibility but required a deeper understanding of database management. The broad language support of Convex even increases integration flexibility and customer specific solutions.
• Real-Time Capabilities: Convex’s built-in real-time data synchronization simplified the implementation of live updates. Supabase required additional configuration and management to achieve similar real-time functionalities.
• Local Development: Supabase’s robust local development environment, facilitated by Docker containers, enabled efficient offline work and testing. Convex’s local development was similarly handy.Both platforms support local development integrated with a hosted environment.

In addition, we examined potential concerns regarding the usage of BaaS in an enterprise project:

• Vendor Lock-In: Transitioning away from a chosen BaaS provider can be challenging due to proprietary technologies and integrations.
• Limited Customization: BaaS platforms may not offer the flexibility required for highly specialized backend functionalities in multi-developer enterprise projects when accommodating diverse client requirements from different industries or highly customized use cases.
• Maintenance: The functionality regarding API versioning and breaking changes is limited, possibly leading to major problems in a complex, distributed, and long-living system.
• Supported features: Limited advanced features compared to hyperscale providers such as AWS or Google Cloud (e.g., queues, extensive database variety).

Should you bet on BaaS?

The decision to adopt a BaaS platform should be guided by a thorough analysis of project requirements, team expertise, and long-term strategic goals keeping the advantages and disadvantages lined out in this blog article in mind. Based on the individual setup, the listed concerns are less or more significant. If infrastructure and vendor flexibility as well as feature support are necessary requirements, you should not rely on BaaS, especially in an enterprise context. On the other hand, if you have more flexibility to these requirements and the main goal is to efficiently implement an application for user needs, you can leverage the advantages of BaaS and efficiently develop scoped applications in the enterprise context as well.

The choice between Convex and Supabase ultimately depends on specific project needs, developer familiarity, and strategic objectives. Teams prioritizing TypeScript integration, realtime responsiveness, and simplified backend management may prefer Convex. Conversely, teams deeply versed in SQL, desiring robust self-hosting, extensive ecosystem support, and integrated authentication might find Supabase more suitable. Understanding these strategic differences allows for an informed decision aligning with enterprise objectives and development team capabilities.

Both technologies are assessed as useful for rapid prototyping, internal applications (e.g., Backoffice), or scenarios with static requirements. They are also deemed usable in productive settings for end customers in granular and static use cases without the need of integration into a distributed system or a complex application landscape.