DBArena benchmarks Supabase, RDS and Cloud SQL head to head
Supabase launched an open-methodology site comparing managed Postgres providers on throughput, price-performance and latency, though Supabase sponsors it and its own engine wins every category.
Supabase launched DBArena on 30 October, a site that benchmarks hosted Postgres providers using an open, reproducible methodology. It currently compares four setups: Supabase Postgres on default heap storage, Supabase Postgres running the OrioleDB beta storage engine, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL Enterprise, across seven compute tiers from a 2 vCPU, 2 GiB Small up to a 32 vCPU, 128 GiB 8XLarge.
Each result reports transactions per minute, transactions per minute per dollar, and p95 latency, with a downloadable raw data file giving the exact commands and configuration behind it. In Supabase’s first published results, Supabase Postgres on OrioleDB (Beta) ranks first on price-performance at every tier, from 155 tpm/$ at Small down to 38 at 8XLarge, in workloads where the dataset outgrows cache.
Why it matters: if you’re choosing or re-checking a managed Postgres host, DBArena gives you a public methodology and raw numbers to verify yourself, rather than a vendor’s marketing chart, for the providers it currently covers.
The caveat: Supabase sponsors DBArena and produced this first benchmark run, in which its own OrioleDB engine wins every category. The methodology and data are open, but this isn’t an independent third party doing the testing.