Eurobase vs Firebase: the EU-sovereign SQL alternative

Firebase EU region is not GDPR-safe — Google-owned means CLOUD Act reach. Eurobase: SQL instead of NoSQL, open standards instead of lock-in, Scaleway (France) instead of Google Cloud, EU company. Migrate off Firebase in an afternoon. €25/mo per project once you go live.

Same job, different architecture

Firebase and Eurobase solve the same problem — auth, database, storage, realtime, serverless functions in one platform — but the architecture underneath is different in two ways that compound: the data model (Firestore NoSQL vs Postgres SQL) and the jurisdiction (Google in the US vs Eurobase OÜ in Estonia running on Scaleway in France).

Google Firebase is operated by Google LLC, a Delaware corporation headquartered in Mountain View, running on Google Cloud Platform. Even when you pick eur3 (Europe multi-region) or europe-west1 for a Firestore instance, the control plane, the encryption keys, and the corporate parent all sit in the United States. That is why the CLOUD Act question keeps coming up for regulated EU procurement — physical residency is not the same as jurisdictional residency.

Eurobase is operated by Eurobase OÜ, an Estonian private limited company registered on 22 July 2026 (registry code 17557586, Ahtri 12, Tallinn). Every processor in the critical path — database, storage, edge functions — is EU-owned and physically in France (Scaleway fr-par). No AWS, no GCP, no Azure. If you are searching for "Firebase Europe" and want the sovereignty answer without the caveats, that combination is what changes.

Is Firebase GDPR compliant? The 90% answer and the 10% gap

Yes — Firebase ships a GDPR Data Processing Addendum via Google Cloud, offers Standard Contractual Clauses, and lets you pin Firestore to European multi-region (eur3) or single-region (europe-west1, europe-west3, europe-west6). For most SaaS teams that is enough to close the compliance ticket. The 10% gap is what your DPO cares about: the CLOUD Act, sub-processor architecture, and DSAR mechanics.

First, the CLOUD Act. A DPA is a contract between you and your processor; it does not override statutes the processor is subject to. Google LLC is subject to US law including the CLOUD Act (18 U.S.C. §2713) and FISA §702, which authorise US authorities to compel disclosure of data held by US-headquartered providers regardless of where the data physically sits. The EDPB has been explicit that this risk survives EU-region hosting when the provider or an upstream processor is under US jurisdiction. A green tick on a Google Cloud compliance page does not neutralise a CLOUD Act warrant.

Second, sub-processor mapping. Under Article 30 GDPR you keep a Record of Processing Activities listing every sub-processor, its role, and the transfer mechanism. Google's Firebase sub-processor list is Google-owned services (Google Cloud, Google Ads, Google Analytics for the Analytics SDK, Crashlytics on Fabric infrastructure) — every one under US jurisdiction. Eurobase's sub-processor list is Scaleway (France), GatewayAPI (Denmark) for SMS, and Mollie (Netherlands) for paid billing — all EU-headquartered. The list is auto-generated in every project's Compliance tab as a downloadable Article 30 record.

Third, DSAR mechanics. GDPR Articles 15 and 20 give data subjects the right to access and port their personal data within 30 days. On Firebase you write a Cloud Function that walks every Firestore collection with a userId field, joins Auth via the Admin SDK, fetches Storage objects, zips them, delivers, and logs. Every DSAR is a mini-engineering ticket. Eurobase ships a one-click console export plus an SDK call (eb.auth.exportMyData()) that end-users can trigger themselves — rate-limited, audit-logged, signed download links that expire after 7 days.

• ▸Physical data residency in the EU: Firebase = yes (with region choice). Eurobase = always, no toggle.
• ▸DPA + Standard Contractual Clauses: Firebase = via Google Cloud DPA. Eurobase = yes.
• ▸CLOUD Act exposure through the provider: Firebase = yes (Google LLC). Eurobase = no.
• ▸Sub-processors under EU jurisdiction: Firebase = no (all Google-owned). Eurobase = 100%.
• ▸Built-in DSAR export (Art. 15 + 20): Firebase = DIY Cloud Function. Eurobase = one click on every tier, free included.
• ▸Article 30 RoPA report: Firebase = you write it. Eurobase = auto-generated from live sub-processor registry.

The Firebase EU region: what physical residency does — and does not — do

Firebase lets you provision Firestore in eur3 (Europe multi-region) or single-region locations like europe-west1 (Belgium), europe-west3 (Frankfurt), and europe-west6 (Zurich). Cloud Storage for Firebase inherits similar EU choices. Doing so puts the data physically inside Europe, which handles the residency dimension of GDPR. It does not, on its own, answer the CLOUD Act question — because 'residency' and 'jurisdiction' are different vectors.

Residency is about physical location. Jurisdiction is about which state's courts and warrants reach the operator. A Firestore eur3 project keeps your document bytes across Belgium and the Netherlands, but Google LLC — the entity that operates the control plane, holds the encryption keys, and can execute an admin operation on your project — is a Delaware corporation answerable to US courts. When the FBI serves a §2703(d) order on Google LLC, the location of the disk does not enter the analysis.

The Microsoft France testimony under oath at the French Senate in June 2025 made this concrete: Microsoft France said they cannot guarantee that data stored in their EU regions stays out of US reach, because the Redmond parent can be compelled by a US warrant regardless. The same logic applies to every US-headquartered provider — Google, Firebase, Vercel, MongoDB, Snowflake, Datadog — whether or not they run EU regions.

Eurobase closes this vector by removing the US-parent from the graph. Eurobase OÜ is Estonian. Scaleway is French (a subsidiary of Iliad). GatewayAPI is Danish. Mollie is Dutch. No hop in the critical path goes through a jurisdiction outside the EEA. That is the difference between "our data is in Europe" and "our provider is Europe."

Looking for a Firebase EU alternative? Three questions that decide it

The search 'firebase eu alternative' tends to come from two audiences: startups in regulated industries (health, fintech, gov-tech, edu-tech) whose DPO has flagged the CLOUD Act, and enterprises whose procurement checklist added an EU-parent requirement after the 2024–2025 sovereignty wave. Three questions decide whether Eurobase is the right substitute:

If the answer to all three is "yes," the honest recommendation is Eurobase. If you have a Flutter app that relies on Firestore's offline sync and nested-document listeners in exactly one screen, evaluate the migration cost against the sovereignty benefit — the answer is not automatic.

For teams already deep into Firebase, most of the surface maps cleanly: Auth (Firebase Auth → Eurobase Auth, 6 methods, JWT sessions), Storage (Firebase Storage → S3-compatible bucket with signed URLs), Realtime (Firestore listeners → Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY + WebSocket subs with row-filter), Functions (Cloud Functions → Deno edge functions). The interesting piece is the data-model migration — see the section below on how your app code changes.

• ▸(1) Do you need EU corporate parent, not just EU region? If yes, Eurobase is one of very few managed BaaS options that satisfies this filter. Firebase EU-region does not.
• ▸(2) Do you need auth + database + storage + realtime + edge functions in one platform? Eurobase ships all five as a Firebase-shaped surface; OVHcloud Managed Database gives you Postgres only, and self-hosting the rest is a big lift.
• ▸(3) Are you willing to move from Firestore NoSQL to Postgres SQL? For many apps this is a small win (real joins, transactions, indexes on any field). For some — offline-first mobile with deep nested-document reads — Firestore is genuinely different. If the app is document-heavy with deep nesting, sit down with an engineer before switching.

Firebase EU hosting compared to a Europe-native backend

The search "firebase eu hosting" typically means one of two things: "does Firebase have EU regions?" (yes — eur3, europe-west1/3/6) or "what does an EU-first alternative to Firebase hosting look like?" (an Estonian-parent operator running exclusively on Scaleway in France, with no US-owned processor in the critical path — Eurobase). Both are valid. The choice depends on which vector you need to close.

• ▸Firestore region — Firebase: choose eur3 multi-region or europe-west1/3/6 single-region at DB create. Eurobase: always Scaleway fr-par (Paris/France), single-region.
• ▸Storage region — Firebase: same EU region as the project (with GCS restrictions). Eurobase: always Scaleway Object Storage fr-par.
• ▸Cloud Functions region — Firebase: europe-west1/2/3 available. Eurobase: fr-par only.
• ▸Control-plane jurisdiction — Firebase: US (Google LLC). Eurobase: Estonia (Eurobase OÜ).
• ▸Sub-processor list — Firebase: entirely Google-owned. Eurobase: 100% EU-headquartered.
• ▸CLOUD Act reach — Firebase: yes through Google. Eurobase: no.

NoSQL to SQL: what changes in your app code when you move from Firestore to Postgres

This is the biggest honest question for Firebase-to-Eurobase migrators. Firebase uses Firestore, a proprietary NoSQL document database with per-collection listeners, sharded queries, and no server-side joins. Eurobase uses PostgreSQL, the same relational engine your DBA has trusted since 1996. Most modern web apps benefit from the switch. A minority of offline-first mobile apps genuinely favour Firestore.

Reads: on Firebase you fetch a collection (db.collection('posts').where('userId', '==', uid).get()); on Eurobase you write SELECT * FROM posts WHERE user_id = auth.uid(). The Eurobase SDK gives you the from(table).select().eq('user_id', uid) shape too, but you also get real SQL — joins, aggregates, window functions, CTEs, full-text search, JSONB, PostGIS. Firestore charges by document read; Postgres charges by query time.

Writes: Firebase transactions are per-document optimistic transactions with a 500-doc batch limit. Postgres transactions are ACID with any table, any row count. If you have ever tried to atomically move a user across two Firestore collections, you have felt the limit.

Realtime: Firestore's snapshot listeners give you a per-document push when anything in the query result changes. Eurobase realtime uses Postgres logical replication surfaced over WebSockets with row-filter — same subscribe-and-render pattern, different engine underneath. Semantics: Firestore delivers full documents; Eurobase delivers row-level change events (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE with new + old row).

Security: Firestore security rules are a proprietary DSL evaluated on every read. Postgres RLS is SQL policies evaluated as a WHERE clause on every row. Both are declarative and both correctly close the client-trust problem — the choice is which DSL your team already knows.

Offline / mobile: this is where Firestore is genuinely different. The Firebase SDK maintains a local cache with automatic conflict resolution on reconnect. Postgres does not; if you need that, you build it with your own outbox pattern (or use a specialised tool like PowerSync / Electric on top of Postgres). Worth flagging honestly.

Firebase pricing vs Eurobase pricing

Firebase Spark (free) covers small apps but caps hard at daily reads/writes and free Cloud Functions invocations. Firebase Blaze (pay-as-you-go) has no fixed monthly base and charges per Firestore read/write/delete plus storage, bandwidth, function invocations, and outbound network — which is where the horror-story bills come from. Eurobase Pro is €25/mo per project with fixed caps; overage is a signal to upgrade to Team rather than a surprise line item.

One nuance worth flagging: Firebase's pay-per-read model can be dramatically cheaper for small apps and dramatically expensive for read-heavy ones (news feeds, dashboards, real-time collaborative tools). Eurobase's fixed per-project pricing is the opposite: predictable at scale, marginally more expensive for near-idle projects. If you are running 10 near-idle side projects on Firebase, Eurobase per-project pricing will feel like a step up; if you have one high-read app on Blaze burning €400/mo, Eurobase Pro at €25/mo is a step down.

• ▸Free tier — Firebase Spark: 50k Firestore reads/day, 20k writes/day, 1 GB storage, 10 GB bandwidth. Eurobase: 5k MAU, 512 MB DB, 512 MB storage, 2 GB bandwidth, 50 realtime, every-tier GDPR primitives included.
• ▸Paid tier — Firebase Blaze: pay-per-read/write/storage/bandwidth/invocation, no fixed base. Eurobase Pro: €25/mo per project, fixed 100k MAU / 100 GB storage / 250 GB bandwidth / 10k realtime.
• ▸Team / enterprise — Firebase: no fixed enterprise tier; you scale via GCP support contracts. Eurobase Team: €149/mo per project (dedicated PostgreSQL 16 on 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM / 50 GB SSD, daily backups + on-demand snapshots, SSO, RBAC, audit trail; SOC 2 Type II coming soon). Coming soon.
• ▸Billing entity — Firebase: Google Ireland Limited or Google LLC depending on region. Eurobase: Eurobase OÜ (Estonia). Some EU procurement teams treat this as a hard requirement for VAT-reverse-charge simplicity.

Vendor lock-in: what actually locks you in on Firebase

Firebase lock-in is not one thing — it is a stack of proprietary primitives that only work inside the Google ecosystem. Migrating away is possible but rarely a config swap. Eurobase is deliberately built on open standards (Postgres, S3 API, JWT, WebSocket, HTTP) so the exit path is a documented migration, not a rewrite.

• ▸Data format — Firestore documents export to a proprietary format; Postgres exports to standard SQL (pg_dump).
• ▸Query language — Firestore SDK is unique to Firebase; SQL is a standard learned by every engineer since 1976.
• ▸Security rules — Firestore rules are a bespoke DSL; Postgres RLS uses standard SQL boolean expressions.
• ▸Realtime — Firestore listeners are unique; Eurobase realtime is Postgres logical replication + WebSocket, both standards.
• ▸Auth — Firebase Auth issues Google-branded tokens; Eurobase Auth issues standard JWTs verifiable by any JWKS-aware library.
• ▸Storage — Firebase Storage wraps GCS with proprietary URL signing; Eurobase Storage exposes the S3 API used by AWS, MinIO, Ceph, Wasabi, and every other object store.
• ▸Functions — Firebase Cloud Functions run only on GCP; Eurobase edge functions are Deno, which runs anywhere Deno runs.

Feature comparison

Firebase vs Eurobase — FAQ

Related reading

• Move off Supabase in one CLI command — what the migrator does and why teams are asking now →
• Supabase GDPR + DPA: what an EU-region deployment actually gets you →
• The $1,500 GDPR Tax: Why DSAR fulfilment belongs in your platform →
• The AI kill-switch and the case for EU sovereignty →
• How the one-click DSAR feature works →