Supabase, Hasura, Lovable, Bolt, Base44, n8n, Power Apps, LangChain — measured on the five axes CTOs actually screen on. Including the rows where the competition genuinely wins. Honest edges make honest claims.
Cyan is a clean win, amber is a partial or conditional answer, grey is a no. Pricing is described by model rather than dollar figures — vendors change their pricing pages more often than their engines.
| Platform | Databases | Self-hosting | Open source | Price model | Time to market |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magic Cloudlet | SQLite · MySQL/MariaDB · PostgreSQL · SQL Server | Full — Docker, on-prem, air-gapped | MIT — runtime and all | Free self-hosted · managed cloudlets from Nuity | One sentence → live, validated, RBAC-locked API. Minutes. |
| Supabase | PostgreSQL only | Yes — with feature gaps vs the hosted product | Apache 2.0 core | Free tier + usage-based cloud | Instant primitives — the backend logic is still yours to write and review |
| Hasura | Postgres-first; DDN adds SQL Server, MongoDB, ClickHouse | Engine yes; DDN tooling gravitates to their cloud | Apache 2.0 engines; build tooling cloud-tied | Free engine + cloud tiers | Instant API layer — business logic lives somewhere else |
| Lovable | Supabase underneath → PostgreSQL | No | Closed | Subscription + credits | Demo in minutes — production after the review-and-debug tail |
| Bolt.new | Supabase underneath → PostgreSQL | No | Closed | Credit-based subscription | Demo in minutes — production after the review-and-debug tail |
| Base44 | Proprietary built-in database | No | Closed | Subscription tiers | Prototype fast — data lock-in on the way out |
| n8n | Not a database — connects to many | Yes | Fair-code (Sustainable Use License) — not OSI open source | Free self-host · execution-priced cloud | Fast for glue and automations — not a production API backend |
| Power Apps | Dataverse — proprietary | No | Closed | Per-user / per-app licensing | Fast inside Microsoft 365 — a walled garden outside it |
| LangChain | None — it's a library | Runs wherever you run it | MIT (LangSmith is a paid product) | Free library · LangSmith paid | A framework — you still build, secure, and host the backend |
Most of the field gives you exactly one answer: Postgres — either directly (Supabase, Hasura's center of gravity) or inherited invisibly through the vibe coder sitting on top of it (Lovable, Bolt). Base44 and Power Apps go further and put your data in a proprietary store you can't take with you.
A Magic Cloudlet speaks SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. That last one matters more than the demos admit: mid-size and enterprise companies run SQL Server estates that aren't migrating anywhere. A cloudlet generates a validated backend on top of the database you already own.
Lovable, Bolt, Base44, and Power Apps are cloud-only — your backend lives on their infrastructure or it doesn't exist. Supabase and Hasura can be self-hosted, with the familiar catch: the hosted product gets features and tooling the community edition waits for.
Magic Cloud self-hosts fully: Docker, your cloud, on-prem, or air-gapped with no phone-home. The same runtime, the same features, wherever it runs. For regulated industries and data-residency requirements this isn't a preference — it's the qualifying round.
The licensing spectrum here is wider than the marketing suggests. The vibe coders and Power Apps are simply closed. n8n is "fair-code" under a Sustainable Use License — source-available, but not open source by the OSI definition, with commercial restrictions attached. Supabase and Hasura ship genuinely open engines, with the important parts of the operational tooling pulling you toward their clouds.
Magic Cloud is MIT — the runtime, the whole thing. Audit it, fork it, embed it, sell with it. The license is the anti-lock-in guarantee: if Nuity vanished tomorrow, your backend wouldn't.
The field monetizes three ways: per-seat (Power Apps — every user is a line item), per-credit (Lovable, Bolt — every generation burns budget), and usage-metered cloud (Supabase, Hasura, n8n cloud). All three grow with your success and none of them cap.
Self-hosted Magic Cloud is MIT-free — the cost is your own infrastructure. Managed cloudlets from Nuity are priced as infrastructure, not per-seat rent. And because generation on a cloudlet collapses auth and hosting into the runtime, the AI token bill for building the backend drops too — we published the math.
Here's the twist in this axis: the vibe coders look fastest. They are — to a demo. Then the tail begins: reviewing generated free-form code, chasing hallucinated calls, fixing the auth layer the model improvised. The BaaS platforms and frameworks are honest about it — they hand you fast primitives and leave the actual backend logic to you.
A cloudlet's clock stops later in the sentence and earlier in the calendar: one prompt becomes a live API where every instruction is statically proven to exist and RBAC is enforced by the runtime — so "it works" and "it's safe to ship" happen in the same minute.
A comparison you can trust has to concede real points. Here are ours.
Supabase has a larger ecosystem and community than Magic Cloud. Lovable and Bolt produce prettier frontends faster. Power Apps wins inside an all-Microsoft shop with existing E5 licensing. LangChain offers more orchestration flexibility if you're building the whole stack by hand anyway. If those are your deciding factors, they may be the right call — we'd rather tell you that in a table than have you find out in a migration.
Not one platform on this page statically proves generated logic against the machine's real capabilities before execution, or enforces RBAC at the runtime itself rather than in generated code. That's the axis this table can't show — because every other cell in that column would be empty. See why that's structural, not incidental →
20 minutes. Your database, your compliance constraints, your team size — we'll walk this table against your reality and tell you plainly if a cloudlet beats what you have.