# Aiven vs Supabase

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-supabase/

Every value below is read from Aiven's and Supabase's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Aiven | Supabase |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes — indefinite, but idle services are powered off | Yes |
| Entry paid plan | $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12. | $25/month for the Pro plan, including the first project and $10/mo of compute credits; additional projects from $10/mo |
| Pricing model | Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. | Fixed monthly plan per organisation plus per-project compute, billed hourly by instance size |
| Managed connection pooling | Supported — not on the Free or Developer tiers | Supported |
| Regions | 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. | 17 specific AWS regions across the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America, plus broader 'general region' groupings that place the project on an available AWS region within an area. General regions do not support read replicas or API management. |
| Engine | PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. | PostgreSQL |
| Connection limit | Set per plan, not by a formula: 100 on the entry paid plan (Startup-4), rising to 200, 400, 800 and 1000 as the plan grows, with 25 on Hobbyist, 20 on Free and 15 on Developer. Aiven states plainly that it does not apply a per-GiB formula, and that some of the allowance is used by Aiven itself to manage the service. | 60 direct and 200 pooled connections on the Micro instance included with Pro; both scale with instance size |
| Database branching | Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write | Supported |
| Point-in-time recovery | Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first. | Point-in-time recovery is a paid add-on on Pro, Team and Enterprise, and needs at least a Small compute add-on alongside it. Worst-case recovery point is 2 minutes. Without it, restores go back only to a daily backup. |
| Read replicas | Supported | Supported |
| Backup retention | By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. | Daily backups: 7 days on Pro, 14 days on Team, up to 30 days on Enterprise. Free projects get no automatic backups at all — Supabase tells free users to export their own data with the CLI. |

## Where they differ

### Entry paid plan

- Aiven: $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing))
- Supabase: $25/month for the Pro plan, including the first project and $10/mo of compute credits; additional projects from $10/mo ([source](https://supabase.com/pricing))

### Pricing model

- Aiven: Fixed plans quoted both monthly and hourly, with the plan setting CPU, RAM and storage together rather than metering them separately. Aiven describes the pricing as all-inclusive: backups, monitoring and support come with the plan instead of appearing as line items. Higher tiers buy node count and backup history — Business adds a standby node, Premium a second. ([source](https://aiven.io/pricing))
- Supabase: Fixed monthly plan per organisation plus per-project compute, billed hourly by instance size ([source](https://supabase.com/pricing))

### Regions

- Aiven: 153 regions across six clouds — AWS 25, Google 42, Azure 39, OVH 22, UpCloud 16, DigitalOcean 9 — counted from Aiven's own reference list, which publishes the regions and no total. No magnitude is recorded, because Aiven states on that same page that the list differs per project and that not all service types are available in every cloud and region: the number is the platform's reach, not PostgreSQL's, and a bar drawn from it would be compared against providers whose counts are engine-specific. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/platform/reference/list_of_clouds))
- Supabase: 17 specific AWS regions across the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America, plus broader 'general region' groupings that place the project on an available AWS region within an area. General regions do not support read replicas or API management. ([source](https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/regions))

### Engine

- Aiven: PostgreSQL, alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey, Kafka, Flink and Grafana. Aiven runs the upstream projects rather than a compatible reimplementation, which is why its own docs point at postgresql.org for per-release detail. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql))
- Supabase: PostgreSQL ([source](https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/connecting-to-postgres))

### Connection limit

- Aiven: Set per plan, not by a formula: 100 on the entry paid plan (Startup-4), rising to 200, 400, 800 and 1000 as the plan grows, with 25 on Hobbyist, 20 on Free and 15 on Developer. Aiven states plainly that it does not apply a per-GiB formula, and that some of the allowance is used by Aiven itself to manage the service. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/reference/pg-connection-limits))
- Supabase: 60 direct and 200 pooled connections on the Micro instance included with Pro; both scale with instance size ([source](https://supabase.com/pricing))

### Database branching

- Aiven: Limited — a full copy from the latest backup, not copy-on-write ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/howto/fork-service))
- Supabase: Supported ([source](https://supabase.com/pricing))

### Point-in-time recovery

- Aiven: Bounded by the plan's backup history, so 2 days on the entry paid plan and 30 at the top. Granularity is fine within that: full backups daily with write-ahead logs copied every 5 minutes or per new file, whichever comes first. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups))
- Supabase: Point-in-time recovery is a paid add-on on Pro, Team and Enterprise, and needs at least a Small compute add-on alongside it. Worst-case recovery point is 2 minutes. Without it, restores go back only to a daily backup. ([source](https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/backups))

### Backup retention

- Aiven: By plan: none on Hobbyist, 2 days on Startup, 14 on Business, 30 on Premium. The magnitude is Startup's 2 days, the entry paid plan. Aiven's high-availability page states 2 days for Hobbyist where the backups page states none — the backups page is the more specific of the two and is what is recorded here. ([source](https://aiven.io/docs/products/postgresql/concepts/pg-backups))
- Supabase: Daily backups: 7 days on Pro, 14 days on Team, up to 30 days on Enterprise. Free projects get no automatic backups at all — Supabase tells free users to export their own data with the CLI. ([source](https://supabase.com/docs/guides/platform/backups))

## Which should you choose?

Pick Aiven if Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.

Pick Supabase if Teams who want Postgres plus auth, storage and generated APIs from one vendor on a fixed monthly bill, and who would otherwise assemble those pieces themselves.

Consider something else: Aiven — You want long recovery history on a cheap plan. Backup history is what the plan tiers buy here: two days on the entry paid plan against thirty at the top.

Consider something else: Supabase — You want only a database. Much of the $25 covers a platform you may not use, and free projects are paused after a week of inactivity, which is not the same as scaling to zero.

## Documented by only one

- Egress over allowance: Supabase: $0.09 per GB for uncached egress and $0.03 per GB for cached, charged only above the plan's quota. Egress restrictions clear at the next billing cycle, or immediately on upgrading or disabling the spend cap.
- Startup credit program: Aiven: Aiven for Startups: $12,000–$100,000 in Aiven credits over 12 months. Requires founded ≤7 years ago and external funding from pre-seed to Series B.
- Storage (entry plan): Supabase: 8 GB disk per project on the Pro plan; 500 MB on Free
- Included bandwidth: Supabase: 250 GB uncached and 250 GB cached egress a month on Pro and Team, pooled across Database, Auth, Storage and every other service as one Unified Egress Quota
- When idle: Supabase: Free projects are paused after one week of inactivity and must be restored manually; paid projects are not paused
- SOC 2: Supabase: SOC 2 Type 2 compliant; report available to Enterprise and Team customers via the dashboard.
- ISO 27001: Supabase: ISO 27001 certified; certificate available to Enterprise and Team customers via the dashboard.
- HIPAA: Supabase: HIPAA compliant; customers may store PHI after signing a BAA and meeting shared-responsibility obligations.
- GDPR / data residency: Supabase: Projects hosted in EU regions keep primary database data in-region; a DPA is available.
- Encryption at rest: Supabase: AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit; sensitive tokens/keys get application-level encryption before storage.
- Role-based access control: Supabase: Organization members can be granted access to specific resources, including read-only and billing-only roles.

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Aiven or Supabase?**

Aiven: $5 a month for Developer — one VM, 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage, with no choice of cloud or region and no connection pooling. The first plan that behaves like a production service is Startup at $75 a month or $0.10 an hour, which is where the uptime SLA and multi-CPU sizing begin; Hobbyist sits between them at $12.
Supabase: $25/month for the Pro plan, including the first project and $10/mo of compute credits; additional projects from $10/mo

**Should I choose Aiven or Supabase?**

Pick Aiven if Teams who want more than one open-source data service from one vendor and one bill — Postgres beside Kafka, ClickHouse or OpenSearch — with the availability tier chosen per service rather than fixed.
Pick Supabase if Teams who want Postgres plus auth, storage and generated APIs from one vendor on a fixed monthly bill, and who would otherwise assemble those pieces themselves.