Comparison

Typebase is best understood as the best of both worlds: the developer experience of Convex with the open, standard Postgres foundation of Supabase.

No vendor lock-in

Typebase does not own any servers. You deploy to Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, or Deno Deploy, providers you already control and understand. If you ever want to move, run npx typebase-io-cli generate-server to get the raw server code and host it anywhere.

Supabase and Convex host your backend on their infrastructure. Migrating away is a significant amount of work.

End-to-end type safety

With Supabase, types are generated from your database schema as a separate step. They can drift out of sync, and Supabase doesn't have a strong concept of typed server functions; most logic lives in the database as SQL or RLS policies. Supabase does offer Edge Functions for TypeScript, but they aren't the core of the platform and most Supabase apps don't center on them.

With Typebase, you write plain TypeScript functions and your client types are always in sync. Your editor always knows exactly what every action accepts and returns.

Standard Postgres, no proprietary database

Convex gives you a great developer experience for writing backend functions, but it uses a proprietary database. Your data is tied to their platform, and you can't use the SQL knowledge, tooling, or ecosystem you already have.

Typebase gives you the same experience of writing simple TypeScript functions, but backed by standard Postgres via Drizzle. Your data is yours, in a database you understand.

Auth

Supabase ships its own auth system. Convex relies on third-party providers like Clerk. Typebase uses better-auth, which supports every major auth strategy (email/password, OAuth, passkeys, multi-factor, and more) with first-class TypeScript support and active development.

Realtime

All three do realtime, and the difference is how much you say out loud.

Typebase gives you streaming actions. Swap .handler() for .stream() and the action becomes an async generator that pushes events over SSE for as long as the client is listening. A publisher connects the two ends: a mutation publishes a typed event, a stream subscribed to it forwards the event to every client watching.

export const getMany = action.output(todo.array()).stream(async function* ({ db, publisher, signal, lastEventId }) {
  const created = await publisher.subscribe('todo.created', { signal, lastEventId });

  yield await read(db);

  for await (const _todo of created) {
    yield await read(db);
  }
});

Event names and payloads are checked at compile time, and events carry ids, so a client that reconnects resumes from the last one it saw instead of silently missing whatever happened while it was away.

Convex is the opposite trade. Every query is reactive by default; you don't write streams or decide what to publish, and the price is a proprietary database and runtime. If you want reactivity everywhere with no wiring at all, that model is hard to beat.

Supabase broadcasts Postgres changes over WebSockets, so a client can subscribe to a table without your backend publishing anything. It also ships broadcast channels and presence, which Typebase has no equivalent for. The flip side is that a table-change subscription bypasses your backend logic entirely: what a client sees is a row, not whatever your action decided to send.

Typebase sits in between on purpose. You say which events exist and what they carry, so the event is part of your API and typed like the rest of it. That's more to write than Convex, and less automatic than subscribing to a table, in exchange for realtime that goes through your own code.

AI-friendly

Coding agents do their best work on stacks they have seen before, with fast and reliable feedback when something is wrong. Typebase is built on Drizzle, oRPC, and better-auth, libraries that already have years of training data and community examples behind them. The end-to-end TypeScript types give the agent a tight compile-error loop after every edit. Adding a new endpoint is dropping a file in actions/; there is no DSL, no generated client to keep in sync, and no hidden registration step.

With Supabase, much of the business logic lives in SQL and Row Level Security policies, where the agent can't lean on the TypeScript compiler at all. The generated types drift out of sync with the schema until you remember to regenerate them, so the editor will happily accept code that breaks at runtime.

Convex has strong types, but it's a newer platform with a smaller footprint in AI training data and a proprietary database/runtime model. Agents are more likely to invent APIs or apply patterns from other tools that don't quite fit.