Side-by-side comparison · Databases & Backend
Clerk vs Firebase vs PlanetScale
Everything that matters when choosing between them, in one place: our rating, what each can do, what they cost, and the trade-offs.
Comparing 3 tools, the maximum.
At a glance
Pick it if: Anyone building a web or mobile app who needs user accounts and logins without writing them from scratch.
Pick it if: Teams building mobile or real-time apps, especially if you already live in Google's world.
Pick it if: Teams running a real product who need their database to stay fast and never go missing.
Overview
| Attribute | Clerk | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| In one line | Ready-made sign-up, login and user accounts you can add to an app in minutes. | Google's backend for mobile and web apps, with logins, data and hosting in one. | Fast, serious databases for apps that have outgrown the free tiers. |
| Pricing model | Freemium | Freemium | Paid |
| Starting price | $20/mo | Pay as you go | From $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes | No |
| Works with Claude Code | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Rating breakdown
Our scores out of 5. The higher bar in each row is highlighted.
| Attribute | Clerk | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall rating | 4.4Winner | 4.1 | 4.1 |
| Ease of useHow quickly someone non-technical gets value from it. | 4.5 | 3.5 | 3.0 |
| FeaturesHow completely it covers its own job, and how well the pieces fit together. | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.5 |
| Output qualityHow good the results are before you fix them. | 4.5 | 4.0 | 5.0 |
| Value for moneyWhat you get for the price, including the free plan. | 4.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 |
| Speed & reliabilityHow fast it is and how often it falls over. | 4.5 | 4.5 | 5.0 |
Feature comparison
A tick means it does this today. A dash means we haven't checked.
| Attribute | Clerk | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access & platform | |||
| Free plan | Yes | Yes | No |
| Mobile app | No | No | No |
| Desktop app | No | No | No |
| Browser extension | No | No | No |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Teams & business | |||
| Team workspace | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Enterprise plan or SSO | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Connects to other apps | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Open source or self-hosted | No | No | No |
| AI abilities | |||
| Works with your files | No | Yes | No |
| Understands images | – | Yes | No |
| Makes images | No | Yes | No |
| Makes video | No | No | No |
| Writes code | No | Yes | No |
| Runs agents or automations | – | Yes | No |
| Learns your brand or style | – | No | No |
| Works in many languages | Yes | – | – |
| Capabilities score | 6/ 17 | 10/ 17 | 4/ 17 |
Pricing
Plans as listed on each vendor's site when we last checked. Confirm before you buy.
| Attribute | Clerk | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plans | Hobby Free New apps and side projects. | SparkOur pick Free Early projects and apps with a small audience. | Postgres, single node From $5/mo Staging and small apps that can tolerate a restart. |
ProOur pick $20/mo billed yearly, or $25 monthly Apps with paying customers. | Blaze Pay as you go, no monthly fee Anything that might grow past the free quotas. | Postgres, high availabilityOur pick From $15/mo Production apps with paying users. | |
Business $250/mo billed yearly, or $300 monthly Growing companies that need compliance paperwork. | Metal From $50/mo Apps where database speed is the bottleneck. | ||
Enterprise Custom Large companies with strict security needs. | Vitess (MySQL) From $39/mo MySQL apps that need to shard as they grow. | ||
Enterprise Custom Single-tenant or fully managed setups. | |||
| Which plan to pick | Build on Hobby. It's enough until you have customers who care about the Clerk branding or need multi-factor login, then move to Pro. Business only matters when a customer asks for a SOC 2 report. | Spark is enough until real users arrive. Move to Blaze when you need Cloud Functions or you're close to a quota, and set a budget alert the moment you do. There's no middle tier, so your bill goes straight from nothing to usage based. | Don't start here for a weekend project; Neon or Supabase are free. When a product has paying customers, the $15 high-availability Postgres is the sensible entry point. Only go to Metal once Insights shows the disk is the slow part. |
Key features
| Attribute | Clerk | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standout features |
|
|
|
Pros and cons
| Attribute | Clerk | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pros |
|
|
|
| Cons |
|
|
|
Who each one is for
| Attribute | Clerk | Firebase | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for |
|
|
|
| You'll find it used by |
|
|
|
Questions people ask
Which is better, Clerk, Firebase or PlanetScale?
Clerk scores highest overall in our ratings (Clerk 4.4/5, Firebase 4.1/5 and PlanetScale 4.1/5). Clerk is best for adding sign-up and login to an app and Google, Apple and passwordless sign-in. Firebase is best for mobile app backends and live-updating data and chat. PlanetScale is best for production apps with paying users and predictable database performance.
Which is cheaper, Clerk, Firebase or PlanetScale?
Clerk: There's a free plan, and paid plans start at $20/mo. Firebase: There's a free plan, and paid plans start at Pay as you go. PlanetScale: There's no free plan. Paid plans start at From $5/mo.
Which is easier to use, Clerk, Firebase or PlanetScale?
Clerk rates highest for ease of use in our scores. Anyone building a web or mobile app who needs user accounts and logins without writing them from scratch.
How we compare
Ratings are our own, from using each tool, across ease of use, features, output quality, value for money, speed & reliability.
Swap in another tool
More tools from Databases & Backend in the library.
