# Better than Supabase: agentic infrastructure is vastly more than Postgres

> Supabase is a very good Postgres with services around it. Agents need a whole platform: workflows, queues, memory, a model gateway, policy, identity for non-humans, and somewhere to run for hours.

Source: https://paddington.io/blog/agentic-infrastructure-is-more-than-postgres

Comparison · 6 min read · 2026-11-03

Supabase earned its place. Postgres with auth, storage, functions and realtime in one dashboard is a great way to build a web app, and Postgres is the right default database. Paddington runs on it.

Agents change what an app needs from its backend. A web app answers requests. An agent works: it runs for minutes or hours, calls models and tools, waits on people, retries, remembers, and acts on systems that matter. Here is what that takes, and where it comes from on Kilter.

| An agent needs | Kilter catalog |
| --- | --- |
| Durable work that survives restarts | `temporal, dapr` |
| Events and queues between agents | `nats, kafka, redpanda, rabbitmq` |
| Memory beyond a chat log | `honcho, letta, qdrant, falkordb` |
| One gateway for every model call | `bifrost` |
| Identity for agents as well as people | `ory, zitadel, keycloak, authentik` |
| Fine-grained permissions | `spicedb` |
| Secrets the agent never sees | `openbao` |
| Policy the platform enforces | `kyverno, Airbender ARC` |
| Search over what the business knows | `meilisearch, typesense, elasticsearch` |
| Traces of what the agent did | `signoz, otel-collector, tempo, loki` |
| Business apps agents can operate | `twenty, outline, nextcloud, ghost` |
| Long-running compute in any language | `Kubernetes, which Kilter runs for you` |

Supabase answers one row of that table very well. Kilter answers all of them with one file:

```yaml
# kilter.yaml
services:
  - postgres
  - ory
  - temporal
  - nats
  - bifrost
  - qdrant
  - signoz
```

## It is lighter than it sounds

A full Kilter dev stack runs in under 3 GB (20 pods, 2.0 GB measured 3 Nov); Supabase's own Docker setup takes 2 to 4 GB for 12 containers. You get the platform for about the cost of the database.

## And it stays yours

The same `kilter.yaml` runs in any Paddington region, on a Miniscaler or on your own cluster. Moving is a deploy.

> Use Supabase for a web app with a database. Use Kilter when agents do the work.