Supabase possibilities
Hi guys 🌊
We are startup team who is developing School Management platform. We are evaluating Supabase and and want to ensure that Supabase will support all the features we plan to build, and that there are no “surprises” or architectural limitations that could block us down the road.
Has anyone here used Supabase for a large multi-tenant platform (e.g. schools, enrollments, classes, payments, scheduling, messaging)? Wondering if Supabase can handle that complexity long-term. We will also have multiple roles (admin, teacher, student, parent).
Cheers from Serbia 😉
3 Replies
i have seen at least one application that serves universities. If you are going to have multiple roles then usually you would have a
profiles table that links to your auth.users() with a column role . From there you can create Row level security policies on the databaseto construct a multi tenancy saas. For scheduling you might be using something like cron jobs or message queues and for messages you may be using realtime. There is a lot of possibility but I think what might help is to provide a list of the core backend functionality that you need and i'll see if i can point you to the relevant documentation and you can see for yourself if it is suitableThanks a lot for the answer. Really appreciate it. Here are some of the backend functionalities:
– User authentication & role-based access (admin, teacher, student, parent)
– Multi-tenant setup (multiple schools with isolated data)
– Class/course management (schedules, capacities, recurring sessions)
– Enrollment & booking logic (waitlists, cancellations, payments)
– Messaging/notifications between users
– File storage & access control (for learning materials)
– Reporting & analytics (attendance, revenue, usage)
– Real-time updates (schedule or message changes)
– Payment integration (Stripe or similar)
- User Authentication : Supabase Auth is quite flexible (email, magick link, sign in with google/facebook as well as signing in with an identity provider like Microsoft should work, see this page https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth for all options)
- Multi tenant setup: This is mainly just database logic and it depends on how you set it up up but you can have a table for schools and then a table for profiles and link each profile for a school (standard relational database stuff)
- Class/course management: Mainly database logic so Postgres will be more than suitable. For anything recurring you will want to look at cron jobs https://supabase.com/modules/cron
- Enrolment/Booking logic: Again mainly database logic
- Messaging/notification: Your are probably looking at realtime to implement this, see https://supabase.com/docs/guides/realtime
- File storage & access control: You will want to use storage buckets and probably can write RLS policies to restrict the files in a bucket to a school or a teacher etc see docs https://supabase.com/docs/guides/storage
- Reporting & analytics: There is no in built analytics for BI but there are tools such as this. https://supabase.com/blog/analytics-buckets which can let you build your own analytics, or perhaps an integration with an external application might also work
- Real-time updates: Using supabase realtime (see above)
- Payment integration: Most people will have a table to manage subscription data for orgs and then a stripe web hook for payment updates. You can find an example here https://supabase.com/docs/guides/functions/examples/stripe-webhooks
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