Lovable vs Base44: Who Owns the Backend?

Base44 vs Lovable gets compared like two chat boxes that draw React apps. That part is close to a draw now. The thing that decides how the next two years go is the backend, and here they are built very differently: Lovable runs your app on Supabase underneath, Base44 runs it on its own platform.

We checked both against their pricing pages and docs on October 27, 2026.

The money

Base44 sells message credits and integration credits. On Base44’s pricing page, billed yearly, Starter is $16 a month for 100 message credits, Builder $40 for 250, Pro $80 for 500 and Elite $160 for 1,200. Monthly billing is 20% more, so Builder is $50. Free gets 25 message credits and up to 5 apps. Integration credits are the second meter: 2,000 a month on Starter, 10,000 on Builder. Every time your live app sends an email or calls the built-in AI, that meter moves.

Lovable Pro is $25 a month for 100 credits plus 5 a day, and since June 2026 the same credits pay for the running app on Lovable Cloud. Run out and the backend pauses. We wrote up where Lovable’s credits go separately, and the free Lovable cost check will price your actual project if you connect the repo.

So on paper Base44 Starter is cheaper and Lovable Pro is cheaper than Base44 Builder. In practice nobody stays on the plan they picked in week one, and the plan price is the smallest number on either bill after launch.

Where your data actually lives

Lovable Cloud is a Supabase project that Lovable owns and runs for you. It’s Postgres. Your tables, your row level security policies, your auth users, your edge functions in supabase/functions/. When you want out, Lovable’s own export gives you a compressed Postgres archive with your users and their password hashes, and you restore it into a Supabase project you own. It’s real work, but every piece has a standard place to land. Our migration checklist covers the parts that break.

Base44 is its own backend. Your tables are Base44 “entities”, your frontend talks to them through the @base44/sdk client, backend functions live in base44/functions/<name>/entry.ts, and logins, emails and file storage are Base44 services. Base44 says you own your code and two-way GitHub sync pushes the full source to your repo (GitHub is on Builder and up, not Starter). True. But open that repo and every data call goes to Base44. You own a frontend that only knows how to talk to one vendor.

That’s the part people miss. “Can I export my code” is the wrong question for both tools. The question is what the exported code needs to run.

The importer tells you a lot

Base44 has a “Migrate from another platform” option that takes Lovable and Bolt projects. Its migration docs list what comes over from Lovable: user-created tables in the public schema with their data, column types, primary and foreign keys, the row level security flag, and the frontend from your GitHub repo. It imports 100 rows per table first so you can preview.

Read that list for what isn’t on it. The RLS flag, not the policies. No auth.users, so your users don’t come along with their passwords. No edge functions, no storage bucket files, no cron jobs. A founder sent us his Base44 import last month asking why every signed-in page was empty. The tables were there, all 14 of them, rows and all. The policies that decided who could see which rows weren’t. He’d clicked Base44’s permission recommendations, which set reads to Creator Only. Every imported row was “created” by the import, not by the users, who had all signed up again as brand new accounts. Two hours to sort out, most of it reading what Base44’s data permissions actually do.

We’re not saying don’t move. We’re saying the importer moves your schema and your data, and the app is the other 60%.

Building with each

Day to day, I’d give Lovable the edge for anything with real data rules, because you can read and change the SQL and the policies, and a developer you hire later already knows Supabase. Base44 is nicer for internal tools and dashboards where you want logins, a database, email and an AI agent wired in from one prompt, and you don’t care who hosts it. Its built-in workflows and the testing agent are genuinely good for that kind of app. Base44 is owned by Wix, and its payments run on Wix too if you pick that option over Stripe.

Both now edit code in the browser on paid plans. Both have GitHub. Base44 has branches inside the editor, which Lovable users have been asking for since forever.

Which one leaves you better off in a year

If the app makes money and you’ll want a developer on it, Lovable. Not because the AI is better. Because when the app outgrows the builder, Lovable’s backend is plain Supabase and Base44’s is Base44. Moving off Lovable Cloud to your own Supabase is a few days. Moving off Base44 means rewriting the data layer and rebuilding auth, because there’s nothing standard on the other side to restore into.

If it’s an internal tool that will always live on a builder, Base44 is fine, and cheaper at the low end.

Already on Lovable Cloud and want the backend in your own account? That’s the job we do: Lovable Cloud to Supabase migration, usually one to two days.