Top Nhost Alternatives in 2026

Supabase is the most direct swap for Nhost's own pitch: a real hosted Postgres database with auth, storage, and functions layered on top, so nothing about your data model or SQL habits has to change. Where Nhost bills usage at the organization level across every project you run, Supabase's $25/month Pro plan is per project, with disk, egress, storage, and monthly active users each billed separately past their included quotas, plus a separate hourly compute charge. That means more line items on the invoice, but each one is published up front rather than folded into an opaque compute credit. One catch: Pro's spend caps are on by default, so hitting an included limit pauses the project outright unless you go into the dashboard and turn on pay-as-you-grow. That's the opposite failure mode from Nhost's uncapped overage, a stopped app instead of a surprise bill, so leaving Nhost for cost control means choosing which risk you'd rather manage, not avoiding the problem. The free plan is genuinely usable for a single project, 50,000 MAUs and a 500 MB database, though it caps you at two active projects and pauses after a week idle. That inactivity pause matches Nhost's own free tier, but Nhost's Starter plan is more restrictive on project count, capping at one project rather than two. Supabase is also open source with a documented Docker-based path to self-host for free, so that option below isn't unique to Appwrite or PocketBase. For teams that want Nhost's bundle without a Hasura dependency, Supabase is the closest like-for-like move.

Appwrite is the pick for teams that want an option Nhost doesn't offer at all: running the whole backend yourself for free, since Appwrite's core server is fully open source. Supabase can also be self-hosted, so the real differentiator against Supabase is how clearly Appwrite prices the managed alternative: every resource on Cloud, bandwidth, storage, executions, database reads and writes, users, has its own published per-unit overage rate, so you can weigh paying for Cloud against running it yourself without a sales call. Appwrite Cloud mirrors Nhost's structure closely otherwise, a $25/month Pro plan per project with a real allowance of bandwidth, storage, executions, and database reads before overage kicks in on whichever resource runs out first. Its data model is document-based rather than Postgres, so teams anchored to relational queries and joins will feel a bigger shift than moving to Supabase. The free Cloud plan caps at two projects and auto-pauses after a week of inactivity. Nhost's own free tier shares that inactivity pause but is tighter on project count, allowing only one project rather than two. Appwrite has also expanded past pure backend work into Sites, a hosting product positioned as an open-source Vercel alternative, giving it more surface area than Nhost covers today.

Firebase is the alternative for teams whose priority is mobile, not Postgres. Its Android, iOS, Flutter, and Unity tooling is more mature than anything Nhost or the other alternatives here offer, and push messaging through Cloud Messaging is free at any volume. The tradeoff is real: Firestore is a NoSQL document database, so the relational queries and joins Nhost's Postgres backend gives you for free turn into denormalized data and multiple reads, and there's no flat monthly bill, only Spark's fixed free quotas and Blaze's pay-per-unit pricing above them. There's also no path to self-host or move off Google Cloud later, unlike Appwrite, Supabase, or PocketBase. Firebase fits teams already building for Google's mobile ecosystem who are willing to trade SQL and predictable billing for the deepest native tooling and a genuinely free tier to prototype in.

Convex is the furthest departure from Nhost's model, and the right one for TypeScript teams that want reactive data more than they want SQL. Instead of a database plus a separate GraphQL layer, you write TypeScript functions directly, and query results update in the frontend automatically when the underlying data changes, without hand-wiring subscriptions the way Nhost's Hasura-based GraphQL requires. Pricing runs $25 per developer seat on the Professional plan, with function calls, storage, and data egress metered past included quotas, similar in spirit to Nhost's compute-credit overage model. The free tier has no time limit, useful for prototypes. Convex isn't a fit for teams that need a standard Postgres database other tools can connect to directly, and its Business plan jumps to a $2,500/month minimum, a bigger gap than Nhost's own step to Team.

PocketBase is the answer for developers who want what Nhost promises, a database, auth, and storage running together, without paying a vendor or an organization-wide bill at all. It ships as a single Go binary with an embedded SQLite database, built-in OAuth2 auth, file storage, and an admin UI, and it's free and MIT licensed with no usage caps set by the project itself. There's no org billing, no compute credit to exceed, and no project pausing after a week idle, since you control the server. The catch is everything Nhost's managed platform absorbs: backups, uptime, and scaling are on you, and PocketBase runs as a single instance on one SQLite file with no path to horizontal scaling. It's maintained largely by one developer, and its own docs call it not yet recommended for production-critical apps, so it fits small teams and side projects more than a team replacing Nhost at real scale.