I see Pocketbase, I upvote. Using it in a few production apps and it's been a very solid experience. Some breaking changes from time to time, but generally very solid.
Also has a lot of extensibility built in.
Sometimes you might hit a scenario where it doesn't provide what you need, which is when things can get a bit hairy, but nothing a skilled dev can't work around.
"If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!"
It is a very good piece of work, and extensible with JS (I just tried that). I have a fear about the future because the dev is alone, and responds alone in the discussions. He is also quite, how to say, "rough" in the interactions, which I can completely understand, being the one pulled around by everyone.
This is a very, very good piece of work when you need to decorrelate the back from the front
Ah yes, the joy of maintaining open source software. I have seen many devs burn out over the requests made of them.
I didn't know it was just one maintainer. That can both be a good thing for keeping the product focused, but it is also worrying, as that's a single point of failure. Anything could happen and then the whole project might fall into disrepair.
That factor alone would make me weary of overly relying on Pocketbase. I would hope that if he runs out of time, the project could be handed over to the community, but often the problem is then that we end up with 50 forks, all at different stages of development. I wonder what the best solution to this issue is.
The most substantial one is a local business directory. It's exactly the right level of medium complexity where Pocketbase shines. It's all the standard stuff:
- User signups and auth
- Stripe subscriptions using different subscription levels
- Business listings with image galleries, editable images
- Map with markers for business locations, tags, filterable business categories & tags
I'd say that the way Pocketbase handles collections, you probably don't want data that is too nested (even though there's a JSON type field, which then allows much deeper nesting).
If you're coming from Firebase, you might be used to infinitely nestable collections, but that's not how it works in Pocketbase. So you could either have a ton of collections or use nested data.
But, if for example, you had multiple clients which then need to hold a bunch of nested data, you couldn't have a 'clients' collections which then holds a bunch of collections within it. It's just one level of 'collections' within which each item then has fields.
This works well at medium complexity, but could get complicated if you had, say, a CMS where you'd want a few levels of nesting.
I love it and use it for personal projects and internal tools. I tend to combine it with https://pocketpages.dev/ which gives me file-based routing and nice templates.
Ah, and Pocketbase has automatic database migrations, so all schema modifications can go into version control.
I even hacked a Gemini protocol server into it, so that I can browse my personal knowledge graph using Lagrange.
For those unfamiliar: this is a backend server you can configure via a GUI, so you can get a working backend with little or no code. It’s great for quick prototypes, MVPs, and simple apps. The concept was popularized by Firebase.
What does it actually do? Yes, I know what a backend is - and the backends I write have hundreds to thousands of lines of code that do very specific things. How can that be eliminated? What types of applications can be built with these tools?
It's meant to be a Firebase / Supabase alternative.
Yes, you can always build a better backend yourself if you know what you're doing, or you can go from zero to having a proper auth (username/password, 0auth providers, one-time emails, multi-factor) to plug into by running a binary.
Unlike Firebase, you can run it anywhere. Unlike Supabase, you don't need 10+ containers to do so.
It does the same things a typical CRUD backend does (REST/realtime API, authentication, authorization, validation, etc.). For example, you could use it when building a simple todo mobile app that syncs your data in the cloud. The catch is that the moment your requirements fall outside what the system supports, you are more or less f*cked.
I've been trying out Pocketbase on a side project idea. I'm super impressed!
Having worked for many years on Django projects, Pocketbase seems like a perfect fit for those small to medium sized projects for which you don't want to create and maintain a traditional backend for.
SQLite only. I haven't come across any GIS integration. I think you should choose Pocketbase when it "not having features" and being lightweight is the feature you need.
I haven't tried this... but Pocketbase is opinionated in how it's schema is structured - and it needs to be the tool managing your schema.
Therefore if it was me, I would use the Admin UI to create a new db with a similar data structure, and then use a third-party tool to select data and insert into the new database.
I’ve been using on a personal side project - but found that LLMs seem to be permanently confused over how to interact with pocketbase - to the point where I’ve even tried creating a Claude Skill to try and reduce the confusion.
Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?
> If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!
It's a niche little product that's alpha-level quality and changes frequently, I don't know why you would expect LLMs to be good at it.
I tried to use LLMs to help me with server-side pb coding, but it was mostly a flop. LLMs don't have an up-to-date state of pb's API. 2 out of 3 times the LLM would give at least a hint how to go about something and the rest is me manually editing the code, reading the docs or looking at pb's source code. All in all, I consider it a nice "pair-programming" type of experience but one can't rely on LLMs to do the pb work for you.
Not with Pocketbase - as I haven't found I've needed to look into the docs too much. But I have come across a whole bunch of areas LLM's seem to always answer incorrectly for. For example, ChatGPT has almost never corrected told me how to use the UI in Davinci Resolve.
I would like to try this. I have tried sqlite and duckdb, both got me started really quickly for an MVP, but then I quickly wished I had MVP’d with supabase because the step of backing up and productionizing was a lot of walking backwards. Maybe just me.
I started with Pocketbase but the limitation around not supporting NULLABLE columns despite being based on SQLITE was starting to become a bit of a liability, so I switched to Trailbase a little while ago.
What a respectfully and humbly written comparison page. Ditto for their Supabase comparison. I can't rate the objectivity since I know very little about TrailBase but they got my attention now. It brings me such joy to see such a writeup in a world where humility is perceived as weakness. Kudos.
I appreciate their honesty. After a quick look I’d give another point to Pocketbase for it’s admin UI. The TrailBase one is pretty sloppy (on mobile at least), and looks like it’s using bootstrap.
Pocketbase has a sense of quality/care around it that seems missing.
Hi! Depends on what you mean by "any JS". Many JS ecosystems depend on an environment. For example, there are browser environments where you get a common baseline with some vendor differences, there's the server where you get common baseline across nodejs, deno, bun with some differences and also proprietary APIs.
Long story short, any vanilla JS (ES5,ES6, probably even common) should be able to run. There's some standard WASI APIs to do I/O through the WASM runtime and a few TB specific APIs.
I'm a huge fan of Pocketbase. Backing up the sqlite though had me more stressed than I'd prefer, and I wanted a plug-and-play way to sqlite3_rsync a backup while Pocketbase was running: so I've been working on this: https://sqlrsync.com. MVP works. Billing isn't being checked yet (be gentle but it's Cloudflare Durable Objects underneath so it should be local, fast, and resilient.) Would love feedback from anyone open to trying it.
Love seeing the love for SQLite. Personally, I've had a great experience with litestream, which will continuously replicate any changes. Are you using https://sqlite.org/rsync.html?
There’s a high level comparison here [1] but it doesn’t go into much detail about the architecture decisions. TLDR; litestream is continuous, sqlitersync is run as a command.
Beware of pocketbase! I am running my startup wetarseel.ai. You'll be badly locked into one instance with one sqlite file, plus its queries are not mapping to SQL, try a bulk delete and it will choke your entire system, plus other footguns.
I'm guess but it probably depends on who's being choked here. If it's the caller, then it may be the overhead of individual deletions for each record when using the record APIs. If other users are being choked, it may refer to locking.
Naively, I would expect SQLite to be able to delete tens-of-thousands (or even hundreds) of records per seconds, since it's simply appending deletions to the WAL.
I've built OpenSOHO using this, and it has been an amazing timesaver!
Even though I modified it a bit to reuse the backend. It's clearly not what it's made for, but it wasn't too hard either. If you have a look at the screenshot, you'll recognize the Pocketbase pedigree immediately.
Sandstorm (open source PaaS + app ecosystem) didn't make it but was encouraging to me at the time -- a standardized PaaS would seem to drastically reduce the lift to build and to host self-host things.
(No shade on compose / helm but have never had a 3rd party compose / helm thing that didn't poop the bed in some way after 6 months)
Is that happening here? Is there an ecosystem of other OSS self-host things built on pocketbase?
I really like this project too! But i think there is some misunderstanding between pb users and creator. As far as I understand creator making it as complete backend solution and users should write all backend by extending pb.
But a lot of user (including me) use pb as database layer only, not as backend. I still write my backend on my project and pb is just like database as a service for me. And much happier than using it as only backend.
I did initially like this, but I didn't really like the experience around extending it.
Ultimately I discovered all the cloudflare primitives soon after (eg durable objects etc), the ease, price and performance are just absurd, it feels like cheating.
some things that still need to be done before v1 launch:
- easy data migration in and out (right now is a pain if its large volume of data from other DB eg firebase or sqlite!)
- API/programmatic setup of tables (right now its only via UI making it hard to setup large complex tables with variable permissions)
- Multi-instance: easiest is to have another pocketbase in "mirror" mode that it updates once a day or whatever with primary (primary > secondary method like in mongo is a great mechanism, with some kind of voting for primary)
Whats the method to maintain a git repo of JS and unit tests? I remember a team with Firebase copy pasting code from dev to prod and between "modules" within an env and making a ton of mistakes.
There have been a ton of releases since then. It looked like a pretty interesting project at the time. It made me want to look for a project to use it for but I never got around to it.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have been using it and how keeping up with the releases has been (compatibility / breaking changes in API, ease of migration, issues, etc).
Been using it for about a year now, but not in a way it's "intended to be". I wrote some scripts that add data to it and then I have a (static) website that pulls data from it and builds pages. So, for me it's more of a REST API and a web interface in front of sqlite than a proper auth provider (at least for now).
My biggest gripe with it by far is that the web interface is not phone-optimised at all, which prevents me from quickly correcting a field or two when I'm not behind a computer. For my use case, that happens at least once a week. Another gripe I have is that the search bar in the admin interface could be far more powerful than it currently is. Anything more complex than searching my records by exactly one field and I'm better off writing one-off scripts to do so than by using the web interface.
Good things: the control it gives me over which fields get exposed publicly, ability to resize images (instead of slowing down my build by doing so from the frontend), overall stability (never had it go down unexpectedly), S3-compatible storage, automated backups.
To give some sense of scale, ~10k records scattered across 30 or so tables (or collections as they call it), most with some attachments, and plenty of one-to-one and one-to-many relations between the tables. The database itself is only a couple of megabytes in size, but the whole backup (attachments included) is nearing 3 gigabytes now.
While updates happen pretty frequently, they don't change the parts I actually use, so I can't say I ever struggled with keeping up to date.
I've been using it for a while. There was only one release that required manual migrations. I think 0.23.0 and apparently the dev is backporting security updates for those who haven't upgraded.
I use Go so all I have to do is `go get -u` and `go mod tidy` and then it's upgraded. It works great.
It makes SQLite a service that provides you with an authenticated data access layer via a REST API. It is not a wrapper although it does use SQLite as its database.
I can mirror everyone singing praise to pocketbase here. Once you grasp the concepts (which map pretty closely to SQL concepts, with rules for row-based security), it is by far the easiest way IMO to create a maintainable, robust backend with direct auth integrations and a pleasant interface.
I have around 5 instances of pocketbase running on a 10 USD/month Hetzner server, serving thousands of users a day without breaking a sweat.
I'll give it a try, but I'm not a fan of the SPA approach. Try using it with Templ and server-side rendering (SSR) instead of any JavaScript framework.
If anyone has already done this and can share their experience, I would love to hear about it!
It works, though if you need auth/authz you'll probably want to add some middleware to get a cookie flow working instead of the jwt approach PB uses by default.
If I remember right, essentially you set the cookie on login and on auth refresh and pull it out and into the auth header on all incoming requests.
We use pocketbase for a lot of our internal LoB apps and it's been bulletproof. Saved us a lot of time and money.
I'm a control freak and I like well defined endpoints with well defined performance characteristics, so the expressiveness of the API is in my mind a drawback for anything public facing, but it's undeniably a great experience on the front end, and if you design your tables with the API and filters in mind you can get to a good place.
Overposting is another thing to be aware of when the db is so ergonomically shaped to the front end
I am curious to better understand the benchmarks against simple SQLite, especially under typical load. Any level of latency will be an unnecessary overhead.
There are so, so many frameworks that it can be overwhelming to find a good fit, but give htmx or svelte a try, they often come up as great ways to simplify JS.
I'd steer clear of NextJS. Maybe even React, as they have become convoluted messes over time that rarely offer much benefit, unless you are on a big team and working on a huge, complex code base. Though job prospects are better for those frameworks. If you use AI in your workflow, however, due to the huge amount of public knowledge available, React and NextJS can become easier to work with. Be wary of the sometimes extreme breaking changes introduced quite suddenly however.
In the last years a market for "no code" software has sprawled, just etch the interface on a tables SPA, plug Okta, plug your backend or Firebase to their apis and you should be set.
You can also find dozens of drag n drop builders and block editors working for modern frontend dev, there are a lot for React for example, just vibe code the components.
> Please keep in mind that PocketBase is still under active development and full backward compatibility is not guaranteed before reaching v1.0.0. PocketBase is NOT recommended for production critical applications yet, unless you are fine with reading the changelog and applying some manual migration steps from time to time.
I believe there is no contradiction with the definition from the linked article?
> A system is said to be real-time if the total correctness of an operation depends not only upon its logical correctness, but also upon the time in which it is performed. Real-time systems, as well as their deadlines, are classified by the consequence of missing a deadline:
> Hard – missing a deadline is a total system failure.
> Firm – infrequent deadline misses are tolerable, but may degrade the system's quality of service. The usefulness of a result is zero after its deadline.
> Soft – the usefulness of a result degrades after its deadline, thereby degrading the system's quality of service.
There is realtime, and there is "realtime". The other one being realtime in apps doing some sort of music thing, flight controllers etc. Then there is web "realtime" that basically only means 2sec in the past-realtime.
It's common to distinguish between hard real-time and soft real-time (and sometimes firm real-time).
This software is supposedly soft real-time, similar to what you'd expect from e.g. an Erlang system. Delayed tasks aren't considered fatal failures but overall you get a user experience close to what hard real-time systems are supposed to deliver.
Heh. I wasn't aware that there was a new definition of realtime. My 40+ year career consisted of about 20% realtime embedded firmware development. In all of my experience, 100ms is an absurdly long delay. Most RTOSs (that call themselves such) have latency measured in μs. The last serious RTOS that I wrote (MSP430, non-preemptive) had a firm requirement that any task must complete within 1ms. That one ran on a single threaded MCU clocked at 25MHz. It had a unix-like scheduler, with prioritized tasks, and I even threw in a 'top' display that showed per-task MCU usage, and load average.
Realtime in tech has a specific definition. The Wikipedia article covers it in more detail, but think about things like airplane wing control or space rocket computers needing to do things exactly when asked, or else people die.
Not saying Supabase is bad at all at what it does and I am very glad that it exists as an open source project, but they don't target the same type of project complexity at all.
Self-hosted Supabase is pretty good. I don't think anyone argues with that. It didn't used to be as smooth and it's certainly hungrier with many more moving parts.
Could you elaborate a bit more on your scaling concerns? You can certainly have lock-congestion with SQLite. That, said Postgres - while awesome - isn't the most horizontally scalable beast.
This project is so well thought out, you couldn't vibe code it in a week or a month. Genuinely, it's quite a wonderfully designed piece of software. It seems simple at a glance, but what makes it so good is almost intangible; it's a joy to use not only because of what it is, but what it isn't as well. And I really believe that's not something you can achieve with vibes in such short order.
Kind of like people said they could write airbnb or dropbox's software in a weekend. Sure, you can approximate it, but there's a bit of soul and momentum and history there that makes it more than a repository of code and gives it a unique capacity and potential all its own.
No, simple answer. Try it, link to the repo and I will tell you all the placed it failed. Vibe coding has its places. For something like pocketbase it most definitely is not ready yet.
Postbase, in contrast to PocketBase, doesn’t seem ready for primetime : ” Brand new project launched 02 Nov 2025, this is boiler plate but working! Expect heavy changes coming every few hours until stable
Mostly all code is ChatGPT generated but manually tested by human.”
I see Pocketbase, I upvote. Using it in a few production apps and it's been a very solid experience. Some breaking changes from time to time, but generally very solid. Also has a lot of extensibility built in. Sometimes you might hit a scenario where it doesn't provide what you need, which is when things can get a bit hairy, but nothing a skilled dev can't work around.
> nothing a skilled dev can't work around.
Agreed. Loved this FAQ notice:
"If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!"
Cool, but misomechanistic jabs are getting boring at this point.
This was my exact comment, thanks.
It is a very good piece of work, and extensible with JS (I just tried that). I have a fear about the future because the dev is alone, and responds alone in the discussions. He is also quite, how to say, "rough" in the interactions, which I can completely understand, being the one pulled around by everyone.
This is a very, very good piece of work when you need to decorrelate the back from the front
Ah yes, the joy of maintaining open source software. I have seen many devs burn out over the requests made of them.
I didn't know it was just one maintainer. That can both be a good thing for keeping the product focused, but it is also worrying, as that's a single point of failure. Anything could happen and then the whole project might fall into disrepair.
That factor alone would make me weary of overly relying on Pocketbase. I would hope that if he runs out of time, the project could be handed over to the community, but often the problem is then that we end up with 50 forks, all at different stages of development. I wonder what the best solution to this issue is.
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what sort of prod apps are you running from it? keen to learn by what other people are doing
The most substantial one is a local business directory. It's exactly the right level of medium complexity where Pocketbase shines. It's all the standard stuff:
- User signups and auth
- Stripe subscriptions using different subscription levels
- Business listings with image galleries, editable images
- Map with markers for business locations, tags, filterable business categories & tags
I'd say that the way Pocketbase handles collections, you probably don't want data that is too nested (even though there's a JSON type field, which then allows much deeper nesting).
If you're coming from Firebase, you might be used to infinitely nestable collections, but that's not how it works in Pocketbase. So you could either have a ton of collections or use nested data.
But, if for example, you had multiple clients which then need to hold a bunch of nested data, you couldn't have a 'clients' collections which then holds a bunch of collections within it. It's just one level of 'collections' within which each item then has fields.
This works well at medium complexity, but could get complicated if you had, say, a CMS where you'd want a few levels of nesting.
I love it and use it for personal projects and internal tools. I tend to combine it with https://pocketpages.dev/ which gives me file-based routing and nice templates.
Ah, and Pocketbase has automatic database migrations, so all schema modifications can go into version control.
I even hacked a Gemini protocol server into it, so that I can browse my personal knowledge graph using Lagrange.
What is Lagrange? I couldn’t find any project in the context of LLM or knowledge graph.
They said they hacked a Gemini server, Lagrange is a Geminispace browser.
https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
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There is a minimalist browser named Lagrange built for the Gemini protocol (a lightweight alternative to HTTP).
I’m guessing that’s what they refer to.
it's funny because no one brought up LLM including the link posted but you go "...it must be LLM related" :)
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For those unfamiliar: this is a backend server you can configure via a GUI, so you can get a working backend with little or no code. It’s great for quick prototypes, MVPs, and simple apps. The concept was popularized by Firebase.
What does it actually do? Yes, I know what a backend is - and the backends I write have hundreds to thousands of lines of code that do very specific things. How can that be eliminated? What types of applications can be built with these tools?
It's meant to be a Firebase / Supabase alternative.
Yes, you can always build a better backend yourself if you know what you're doing, or you can go from zero to having a proper auth (username/password, 0auth providers, one-time emails, multi-factor) to plug into by running a binary.
Unlike Firebase, you can run it anywhere. Unlike Supabase, you don't need 10+ containers to do so.
It does the same things a typical CRUD backend does (REST/realtime API, authentication, authorization, validation, etc.). For example, you could use it when building a simple todo mobile app that syncs your data in the cloud. The catch is that the moment your requirements fall outside what the system supports, you are more or less f*cked.
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Looking at the examples on the front page it reminds me even more about Parse.
I've been trying out Pocketbase on a side project idea. I'm super impressed!
Having worked for many years on Django projects, Pocketbase seems like a perfect fit for those small to medium sized projects for which you don't want to create and maintain a traditional backend for.
Happy to answer any questions.
Django has great GIS integration. How does Pocketbase compare here ? Also, can Pocketbase work with PostgreSQL or is it SQLite only ?
SQLite only. I haven't come across any GIS integration. I think you should choose Pocketbase when it "not having features" and being lightweight is the feature you need.
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How easily can I migrate from an existing sqlite-based backend?
I haven't tried this... but Pocketbase is opinionated in how it's schema is structured - and it needs to be the tool managing your schema.
Therefore if it was me, I would use the Admin UI to create a new db with a similar data structure, and then use a third-party tool to select data and insert into the new database.
I’ve been using on a personal side project - but found that LLMs seem to be permanently confused over how to interact with pocketbase - to the point where I’ve even tried creating a Claude Skill to try and reduce the confusion.
Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?
From the top of https://pocketbase.io/faq/
> If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!
It's a niche little product that's alpha-level quality and changes frequently, I don't know why you would expect LLMs to be good at it.
I tried to use LLMs to help me with server-side pb coding, but it was mostly a flop. LLMs don't have an up-to-date state of pb's API. 2 out of 3 times the LLM would give at least a hint how to go about something and the rest is me manually editing the code, reading the docs or looking at pb's source code. All in all, I consider it a nice "pair-programming" type of experience but one can't rely on LLMs to do the pb work for you.
Not with Pocketbase - as I haven't found I've needed to look into the docs too much. But I have come across a whole bunch of areas LLM's seem to always answer incorrectly for. For example, ChatGPT has almost never corrected told me how to use the UI in Davinci Resolve.
[dead]
I would like to try this. I have tried sqlite and duckdb, both got me started really quickly for an MVP, but then I quickly wished I had MVP’d with supabase because the step of backing up and productionizing was a lot of walking backwards. Maybe just me.
Trailbase is the same concept, but written in Rust instead of Go.
I started with Pocketbase but the limitation around not supporting NULLABLE columns despite being based on SQLITE was starting to become a bit of a liability, so I switched to Trailbase a little while ago.
TrailBase has a comparison page https://trailbase.io/comparison/pocketbase/
What a respectfully and humbly written comparison page. Ditto for their Supabase comparison. I can't rate the objectivity since I know very little about TrailBase but they got my attention now. It brings me such joy to see such a writeup in a world where humility is perceived as weakness. Kudos.
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I appreciate their honesty. After a quick look I’d give another point to Pocketbase for it’s admin UI. The TrailBase one is pretty sloppy (on mobile at least), and looks like it’s using bootstrap.
Pocketbase has a sense of quality/care around it that seems missing.
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Trailbase won my heart by not leaving out curl-commands in their examples :)
Looks pretty nice! Do I understand correctly you can have it run any JS in an endpoint too? Seems you could host your whole app with this
https://trailbase.io/getting-started/first-ui-app/#custom-en...
Hi! Depends on what you mean by "any JS". Many JS ecosystems depend on an environment. For example, there are browser environments where you get a common baseline with some vendor differences, there's the server where you get common baseline across nodejs, deno, bun with some differences and also proprietary APIs. Long story short, any vanilla JS (ES5,ES6, probably even common) should be able to run. There's some standard WASI APIs to do I/O through the WASM runtime and a few TB specific APIs.
Another selling point for Pocketbase then.
Pocketbase is awesome. I'm using it as the auth layer for my side project (https://kavla.dev/).
The hooks are great, even relatively complex things like spinning up infrastructure is easy (https://pocketbase.io/docs/go-event-hooks/)
I'm a huge fan of Pocketbase. Backing up the sqlite though had me more stressed than I'd prefer, and I wanted a plug-and-play way to sqlite3_rsync a backup while Pocketbase was running: so I've been working on this: https://sqlrsync.com. MVP works. Billing isn't being checked yet (be gentle but it's Cloudflare Durable Objects underneath so it should be local, fast, and resilient.) Would love feedback from anyone open to trying it.
Sorry if my question is misguided: did you try SQLite3's native online backup API? I would not use raw file access knowing they have that.
Love seeing the love for SQLite. Personally, I've had a great experience with litestream, which will continuously replicate any changes. Are you using https://sqlite.org/rsync.html?
What are the differences between sqlrsync and litestream?
There’s a high level comparison here [1] but it doesn’t go into much detail about the architecture decisions. TLDR; litestream is continuous, sqlitersync is run as a command.
Beware of pocketbase! I am running my startup wetarseel.ai. You'll be badly locked into one instance with one sqlite file, plus its queries are not mapping to SQL, try a bulk delete and it will choke your entire system, plus other footguns.
I am so confused about this message
Sounds like an sqllite performance tuning issue than anything else.
check the benchmarks here https://trailbase.io/reference/benchmarks/ its clear thats a lot of overhead on top of sqlite
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I'm guess but it probably depends on who's being choked here. If it's the caller, then it may be the overhead of individual deletions for each record when using the record APIs. If other users are being choked, it may refer to locking.
Naively, I would expect SQLite to be able to delete tens-of-thousands (or even hundreds) of records per seconds, since it's simply appending deletions to the WAL.
The source code is structured pretty well. I really like the file abstraction that allows for both local and S3 via the interfaces.
I've built OpenSOHO using this, and it has been an amazing timesaver! Even though I modified it a bit to reuse the backend. It's clearly not what it's made for, but it wasn't too hard either. If you have a look at the screenshot, you'll recognize the Pocketbase pedigree immediately.
https://github.com/rubenbe/opensoho/
Sandstorm (open source PaaS + app ecosystem) didn't make it but was encouraging to me at the time -- a standardized PaaS would seem to drastically reduce the lift to build and to host self-host things.
(No shade on compose / helm but have never had a 3rd party compose / helm thing that didn't poop the bed in some way after 6 months)
Is that happening here? Is there an ecosystem of other OSS self-host things built on pocketbase?
Is this some sort of supabase but with sqlite and without the operational complexity?
Yes that is what it is.
I really like this project too! But i think there is some misunderstanding between pb users and creator. As far as I understand creator making it as complete backend solution and users should write all backend by extending pb.
But a lot of user (including me) use pb as database layer only, not as backend. I still write my backend on my project and pb is just like database as a service for me. And much happier than using it as only backend.
I agree but I’ve never been sure what that version of the product looks like then.
I did initially like this, but I didn't really like the experience around extending it.
Ultimately I discovered all the cloudflare primitives soon after (eg durable objects etc), the ease, price and performance are just absurd, it feels like cheating.
love it. been using for personal projects.
some things that still need to be done before v1 launch:
- easy data migration in and out (right now is a pain if its large volume of data from other DB eg firebase or sqlite!)
- API/programmatic setup of tables (right now its only via UI making it hard to setup large complex tables with variable permissions)
- Multi-instance: easiest is to have another pocketbase in "mirror" mode that it updates once a day or whatever with primary (primary > secondary method like in mongo is a great mechanism, with some kind of voting for primary)
Whats the method to maintain a git repo of JS and unit tests? I remember a team with Firebase copy pasting code from dev to prod and between "modules" within an env and making a ton of mistakes.
I'd love to read the docs, but I'm still busy playing with the googly-eye-gopher on the landing page. Super cute idea.
It got some good discussion back in January, 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38898934
There have been a ton of releases since then. It looked like a pretty interesting project at the time. It made me want to look for a project to use it for but I never got around to it.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have been using it and how keeping up with the releases has been (compatibility / breaking changes in API, ease of migration, issues, etc).
Been using it for about a year now, but not in a way it's "intended to be". I wrote some scripts that add data to it and then I have a (static) website that pulls data from it and builds pages. So, for me it's more of a REST API and a web interface in front of sqlite than a proper auth provider (at least for now).
My biggest gripe with it by far is that the web interface is not phone-optimised at all, which prevents me from quickly correcting a field or two when I'm not behind a computer. For my use case, that happens at least once a week. Another gripe I have is that the search bar in the admin interface could be far more powerful than it currently is. Anything more complex than searching my records by exactly one field and I'm better off writing one-off scripts to do so than by using the web interface.
Good things: the control it gives me over which fields get exposed publicly, ability to resize images (instead of slowing down my build by doing so from the frontend), overall stability (never had it go down unexpectedly), S3-compatible storage, automated backups.
To give some sense of scale, ~10k records scattered across 30 or so tables (or collections as they call it), most with some attachments, and plenty of one-to-one and one-to-many relations between the tables. The database itself is only a couple of megabytes in size, but the whole backup (attachments included) is nearing 3 gigabytes now.
While updates happen pretty frequently, they don't change the parts I actually use, so I can't say I ever struggled with keeping up to date.
I've been using it for a while. There was only one release that required manual migrations. I think 0.23.0 and apparently the dev is backporting security updates for those who haven't upgraded.
I use Go so all I have to do is `go get -u` and `go mod tidy` and then it's upgraded. It works great.
How is it in production? Does it it live up to your requirements?
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> PocketBase is an open source backend consisting of embedded database (SQLite) with realtime subscriptions
I am not sure I understand—is this a wrapper around SQLite?
It makes SQLite a service that provides you with an authenticated data access layer via a REST API. It is not a wrapper although it does use SQLite as its database.
It creates a REST API for your SQLite database with some extras.
I can mirror everyone singing praise to pocketbase here. Once you grasp the concepts (which map pretty closely to SQL concepts, with rules for row-based security), it is by far the easiest way IMO to create a maintainable, robust backend with direct auth integrations and a pleasant interface.
I have around 5 instances of pocketbase running on a 10 USD/month Hetzner server, serving thousands of users a day without breaking a sweat.
What kind of app do you use it for?
I see Pocketbase, I upvote!
I'll give it a try, but I'm not a fan of the SPA approach. Try using it with Templ and server-side rendering (SSR) instead of any JavaScript framework.
If anyone has already done this and can share their experience, I would love to hear about it!
I can speak to this.
It works, though if you need auth/authz you'll probably want to add some middleware to get a cookie flow working instead of the jwt approach PB uses by default.
If I remember right, essentially you set the cookie on login and on auth refresh and pull it out and into the auth header on all incoming requests.
This is an amazing project, can't wait to see the 1.0
We use pocketbase for a lot of our internal LoB apps and it's been bulletproof. Saved us a lot of time and money.
I'm a control freak and I like well defined endpoints with well defined performance characteristics, so the expressiveness of the API is in my mind a drawback for anything public facing, but it's undeniably a great experience on the front end, and if you design your tables with the API and filters in mind you can get to a good place.
Overposting is another thing to be aware of when the db is so ergonomically shaped to the front end
How's this different from... a database? Most modern dbs come with auth and some gui. I guess if you need real-time updates this is cool
using it on mobile too
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocketbase-mobile-pok/id674828...
Wow you charge a subscription for this? The Apple ecosystem is wild.
I am curious to better understand the benchmarks against simple SQLite, especially under typical load. Any level of latency will be an unnecessary overhead.
How do you use simple SQLite without any code in a webapp where the database is on the server?
You can't. I am curious if this adds another layer of latency.
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I would love something similar but for frontend.
I like developing backends, but writing JavaScript is to tiring.
There are so, so many frameworks that it can be overwhelming to find a good fit, but give htmx or svelte a try, they often come up as great ways to simplify JS. I'd steer clear of NextJS. Maybe even React, as they have become convoluted messes over time that rarely offer much benefit, unless you are on a big team and working on a huge, complex code base. Though job prospects are better for those frameworks. If you use AI in your workflow, however, due to the huge amount of public knowledge available, React and NextJS can become easier to work with. Be wary of the sometimes extreme breaking changes introduced quite suddenly however.
In the last years a market for "no code" software has sprawled, just etch the interface on a tables SPA, plug Okta, plug your backend or Firebase to their apis and you should be set.
You can also find dozens of drag n drop builders and block editors working for modern frontend dev, there are a lot for React for example, just vibe code the components.
What facilities would an equivalent frontend solutuon have in your mind?
> Please keep in mind that PocketBase is still under active development and full backward compatibility is not guaranteed before reaching v1.0.0. PocketBase is NOT recommended for production critical applications yet, unless you are fine with reading the changelog and applying some manual migration steps from time to time.
Even for battle-tested software like Postgresql, always read the changelog and test it thoroughly before upgrading.
Been following this for some time now and it's a real delight to use. SSE subscription is really nice.
Do you use it in small projects only?
Is this really realtime?
From looking at the description it sounds more like subscriptions to events of data changes that are dispatched close to the data operation
How would realtime even work for a networked system going over tcp?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing
I believe there is no contradiction with the definition from the linked article?
> A system is said to be real-time if the total correctness of an operation depends not only upon its logical correctness, but also upon the time in which it is performed. Real-time systems, as well as their deadlines, are classified by the consequence of missing a deadline:
> Hard – missing a deadline is a total system failure.
> Firm – infrequent deadline misses are tolerable, but may degrade the system's quality of service. The usefulness of a result is zero after its deadline.
> Soft – the usefulness of a result degrades after its deadline, thereby degrading the system's quality of service.
From what I can tell, https://pocketbase.io/ attempts to be a soft-realtime system.
Really? I couldn't really see anything wrt degraded performance from my casual glance.
To me, It looks like there are just best effort events with literally no constraints or handling for delays etc
And again, I didn't see how you'd even implement such without being on both sides of the networked connection
I guess I just have to accept that the term has lost it's meaning at this point and can be used for whatever whoever wants to use it for
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There is realtime, and there is "realtime". The other one being realtime in apps doing some sort of music thing, flight controllers etc. Then there is web "realtime" that basically only means 2sec in the past-realtime.
It's common to distinguish between hard real-time and soft real-time (and sometimes firm real-time).
This software is supposedly soft real-time, similar to what you'd expect from e.g. an Erlang system. Delayed tasks aren't considered fatal failures but overall you get a user experience close to what hard real-time systems are supposed to deliver.
Realtime in tech is considered in timespans with short delays allowed, last time i have read about it it was like 100ms.
Heh. I wasn't aware that there was a new definition of realtime. My 40+ year career consisted of about 20% realtime embedded firmware development. In all of my experience, 100ms is an absurdly long delay. Most RTOSs (that call themselves such) have latency measured in μs. The last serious RTOS that I wrote (MSP430, non-preemptive) had a firm requirement that any task must complete within 1ms. That one ran on a single threaded MCU clocked at 25MHz. It had a unix-like scheduler, with prioritized tasks, and I even threw in a 'top' display that showed per-task MCU usage, and load average.
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Are you talking about (very good) webapps?
Your average RT software has an average of 10 to 30 ms delay between operations. Performs tasks in the order of nanoseconds.
Realtime in tech has a specific definition. The Wikipedia article covers it in more detail, but think about things like airplane wing control or space rocket computers needing to do things exactly when asked, or else people die.
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Database, admin, auth... is this some kind of Go's Django ?
It's a platform similar to Supabase, Firebase and the like. I guess Heroku is also a somewhat reasonable comparison.
This is 100% sick. Have been use this for one year.
Apparently 1 file just means a static go binary with a bunch of separate assets compiled in.
I guess for some reason I was hoping for source code that was only one file.
Same here. At first, I thought it was a one-file-based database, which would have been even more commendable.
Same
Like a single header c lib from some eastern European S tier programmer.
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Hmmm… firebase clones are many and varied.
Whats special about this one?
Being a single file binary doesnt impress me; thats true of many projects in many langauges.
It seems nice you can use it as a go framework if you happen to use go, but Im not really compelled by the “it doesn't scale at all” aspects of it.
Someone whos used some other similar stuff comment on why this over any of the others, eg. self hosted superbase?
Have you ever seriously looked into self-hosting Supabase?
One binary to manage one sqlite file is indeed quite a selling point in comparison to this: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/blob/master/docker/dock...
Not saying Supabase is bad at all at what it does and I am very glad that it exists as an open source project, but they don't target the same type of project complexity at all.
Self-hosted Supabase is pretty good. I don't think anyone argues with that. It didn't used to be as smooth and it's certainly hungrier with many more moving parts.
Could you elaborate a bit more on your scaling concerns? You can certainly have lock-congestion with SQLite. That, said Postgres - while awesome - isn't the most horizontally scalable beast.
Hmmm… firebase clones are many and varied.
Can you recommend any in particular, were I wanting to migrate a project from firebase?
The most well-known ones are probably: Supabase, AppWrite and PocketBase.
Congrats on the launch!
eh? what launch? been using it for years now, it's brilliant
I can vibe code this in rust in a day most
This project is so well thought out, you couldn't vibe code it in a week or a month. Genuinely, it's quite a wonderfully designed piece of software. It seems simple at a glance, but what makes it so good is almost intangible; it's a joy to use not only because of what it is, but what it isn't as well. And I really believe that's not something you can achieve with vibes in such short order.
Kind of like people said they could write airbnb or dropbox's software in a weekend. Sure, you can approximate it, but there's a bit of soul and momentum and history there that makes it more than a repository of code and gives it a unique capacity and potential all its own.
No, simple answer. Try it, link to the repo and I will tell you all the placed it failed. Vibe coding has its places. For something like pocketbase it most definitely is not ready yet.
lol
Neat. You should do a video of that and comparing the results.
Postbase uses PostgreSQL and BetterAuth. No GUI yet, but it's in the plan and will be called Admin (Panel).
I had the same instinct of using SQLite, but then, after a bit of research, PostgreSQL seemed a better alternative for serious projects.
Postbase, in contrast to PocketBase, doesn’t seem ready for primetime : ” Brand new project launched 02 Nov 2025, this is boiler plate but working! Expect heavy changes coming every few hours until stable
Mostly all code is ChatGPT generated but manually tested by human.”
And by that description, I assume it's never going to be ready for primetime.