Database Performance Debate: PlanetScale vs. Supabase
A debate has emerged among developers regarding the performance of PlanetScale and Supabase. One user claimed their paid PlanetScale database was significantly slower than the free tier of Supabase, prompting them to switch back. Others countered that such issues likely stem from configuration errors, arguing that PlanetScale is generally faster for production workloads.
- PlanetScale is built on Vitess, a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL that was originally created to handle YouTube's massive workloads. Supabase, in contrast, is built on top of PostgreSQL, providing a suite of tools that offer a backend-as-a-service experience similar to Firebase. - The core architectural difference lies in their scaling philosophies: PlanetScale is designed for horizontal scaling by distributing data across multiple MySQL instances, while Supabase focuses on vertical scaling of its PostgreSQL databases and the use of read replicas. - In a 2025 benchmark, PlanetScale's database, using a MySQL-compatible engine, averaged approximately 35,000 queries per second (QPS) on a read-only workload, while Supabase's PostgreSQL-based free tier averaged around 18,000 QPS on a similar test. - Performance can also be influenced by the underlying database technology; MySQL, which PlanetScale is compatible with, generally excels in read-heavy workloads, whereas PostgreSQL, used by Supabase, is often favored for complex queries and write-heavy operations. - PlanetScale's architecture leverages Vitess to offer features like non-blocking schema changes and database branching, which allows developers to treat their database schema like code. Supabase provides a broader, more integrated backend solution that includes authentication, file storage, and edge functions out-of-the-box. - A key component of Supabase's architecture for handling many connections, especially from serverless functions, is Supavisor, a connection pooler that maintains and reuses "hot" connections to the PostgreSQL database. - For its paid tiers, PlanetScale utilizes high-performance infrastructure such as locally-attached NVMe drives and ARM64 CPUs (AWS Graviton processors) to reduce latency. - While PlanetScale's original free tier has been discontinued, Supabase continues to offer a free plan with 500MB of database storage and 1GB of file storage.
