Introduction

WhatsApp seems simple: It’s just a messenger app. But its edge in speed, reliability and encryption have place it as a leading messenger app.

But even WhatsApp is not perfect. It is not available for all platforms. It is not very well cross-compatible with other messengers and does not offer perfect integration with other messengers. And it can happen that you lose messages when you lose your device.

For similar reasons to WhatsApp, due to its reliability and speed, Discord, which is not end-to-end-encrypted, has been able to retain their users. Another app built with the BEAM VM.

When building a mobile app, choosing the right backend is just as crucial as the app itself. Your backend determines how your app scales, how fast data syncs in real time, and—most importantly—how much it will cost you in the long run.

Today, let’s compare Firebase, Supabase, and Locality Social Cloud to help you make an informed decision!

Firebase

1️⃣ Firebase – The Google-Powered Giant ✅ Best for: Rapid prototyping, MVPs, and apps that rely on Google’s ecosystem. 🔥 Shines at: Ease of use, real-time updates, and managed authentication. 💰 Pricing: Free tier available, but scales per read/write operation, which can get expensive.

What Makes Firebase Great?

Firestore & Realtime Database for cloud-based data storage. Firebase Authentication with Google, Apple, Facebook, and email logins. Firebase Cloud Functions for backend logic (serverless). Hosting, push notifications, analytics, and more—all tightly integrated.

Where Firebase Falls Short

Latency: 200-500ms per request (can be slow for real-time interactions). Pricing: Costs increase based on database operations, making it expensive at scale. No SQL Support: Firestore is a NoSQL database, which means complex queries can be tricky. Vendor Lock-in: You’re tied to Google’s ecosystem.

Supabase

2️⃣ Supabase – The Open-Source Firebase Alternative ✅ Best for: Developers who want PostgreSQL with Firebase-like features. 🔥 Shines at: SQL-based queries, real-time database updates, and backend extensibility. 💰 Pricing: Free tier available, scales based on database size and function execution.

What Makes Supabase Great?

PostgreSQL-based database with full SQL support. WebSockets for real-time updates (faster than Firebase in many cases). Edge Functions for custom backend logic. Open-source—you can self-host and avoid vendor lock-in.

Where Supabase Falls Short

Latency: Generally 100-300ms, but can spike under heavy load. Complexity: Requires SQL knowledge (not as beginner-friendly as Firebase). Scaling Challenges: Large-scale apps need careful database tuning.

Locality Social Cloud

3️⃣ Locality Social Cloud – Real-Time Event Processing at Scale ✅ Best for: Social networks, event-driven apps, and applications needing low-latency synchronization. 🔥 Shines at: Real-time performance, decentralized hosting options, and cost efficiency at scale. 💰 Pricing: Pay-per-emitted-event model.

What Makes Locality Social Cloud Great?

Ultra-low latency (<1ms event processing, much faster than Firebase/Supabase). Scales horizontally without bottlenecks (built with Erlang). Decentralization-ready—companies can self-host. No per-query costs (only charged for emitted events). Better concurrency handling than traditional databases. Optimized for cloud cybersecurity

Where Locality Social Cloud Falls Short

Not a general-purpose database (focuses on event-driven architecture). Requires a different mindset (not CRUD-based like Firebase or Supabase). Newer in the market compared to Firebase/Supabase.

The power of being opininionated

Locality Social Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all-solution.

Locality is there to fuel the development of serverless apps with Flutter that are end-to-end-encrypted, realtime and social.

Social Apps are fundamentally a technological reflection of real social interactions. In real social interactions, we interact through objective space that transports state changes at light speed. The challenge of creating objective spaces for multiple observers across many devices is fundamental. Traditionally, state management and business logic are performed on servers. This creates significant challenges when dealing with End-to-End-encrypted interactions. With Locality Social Cloud, you can create serverless Social Apps and model all your domains on the frontend. This allows for improved flexibility when building or updating features (no deployment) and allows you to develop Social Apps in a way where the problem modelling just fits the problem space more naturally.

For us, it allows for simple horizontal scaling. We know that a channel is an atomic context. This allows us to scale horizontally. We leverage ground-breaking caching technologies based on stochastic processes and Erlang’s inbuilt OTP support as well as :mnesia to maximize the througput of our servers at low latency and massive scale.

The allows for eventual consistency and partition tolerance in a distributed system. Since the Locality Social Cloud protocol was implemented in the BEAM VM it is set up for low-latency and high realiability.

Through these methods, Locality Social Cloud is designed for low-latency event synchronization with Erlang’s sub-millisecond message passing. Latency is significantly lower than Firebase/Supabase for pub/sub-based event propagation abd it is highly optimized for high concurrency and distributed event consistency.

For you, it means your apps work at blazing speed, reliability and at low cost.

For your user it means, you have to earn less money to be profitable, which gives you larger margines in product management.

Build something better than WhatsApp

With Locality Social Cloud you can improve upon WhatsApp. The only thing we share with WhatsApp, technologically, is the use of Erlang and the BEAM VM.

Locality Social Cloud is part of the Flutter ecosystem, which means you can use it to write cross-platform-apps, including Linux support.

Locality Social Cloud allows for syndication of content; With our open source chat library and friends-list library users and friendlists can be shared across apps in a secure way. This way, all projects that contain the locality messenger protocol can message each other in an end-to-end-encrypted way.

Lcocality Social Cloud offers PubSub synchronization; If you log in to your account on another device, you can work on multiple devices simultaneously.

Due to our special security protocol, the events can remain end-to-end-encrypted and the server has no access to the data, but it keeps the data. This way, when you log in to your device on another account, you can restore your old messages, even though they are encrypted.

Closing words

Writings apps that are fast, reliable and secure can give products a critical edge in user experience and retention.

Locality Social Cloud vs Firebase vs Supabase