Base44 vs Bolt.new: Honest 2026 Comparison

What changed in 2026 (and why every other comparison is stale)

This comparison used to have a clean shape: Bolt gives you real code and no backend, Base44 gives you a backend and keeps the code. Both halves of that sentence were contradicted by the vendors themselves during 2026, and almost every page you will find on this query was published before the change — the head-to-heads currently ranking for "base44 vs bolt.new" carry publication dates from July 2025 to February 2026.

We re-checked both vendors' own pages on 13 September 2026. Here is what is actually true now.

Bolt now bundles hosting and a database

Bolt — the product StackBlitz ships at bolt.new, and which its own pricing page and documentation now call simply "Bolt" — lists website hosting and unlimited databases on its Free tier, alongside a 300,000-token daily limit, 1 million tokens per month, Bolt branding on published sites, a 10MB file upload limit, and up to 333,000 web requests. Pro at $25 per month removes the branding, lifts the request ceiling to 1 million, and adds custom domain support, expanded database capacity, and choice of database provider.

The backend is not a thin veneer either. Bolt's documentation states that new projects use Bolt Database by default, with Supabase selectable as an alternative at project creation on any paid plan. Bolt Database ships with email sign-up and login, Google single sign-on, editable authentication email templates, and leaked-password protection powered by HaveIBeenPwned that the docs describe as available on all Bolt plans and on by default. Published projects are served on bolt.host subdomains.

So "Bolt has no database" and "Bolt has no auth" are both retired claims. This page asserted them until September 2026, and they have been corrected below.

Base44 now claims two-way GitHub sync

Base44's pricing page FAQ answers the question "Do I own my app, and can I export the code?" with this, verbatim:

"Yes. You own everything you build on Base44: your code, your data, your users. Two-way GitHub sync exports the full source code to your own repo at any time. Nothing is locked to the platform."

The export is real. The last sentence is the one that needs testing, and testing it is the one thing a review blog cannot do and a shop that runs Base44 exits every month can. That section is further down this page.

One detail worth checking against your own plan before you rely on the sync: "Github integration" appears in the plan highlights for Builder ($40/mo), Pro ($80/mo) and Elite ($160/mo) on base44.com/pricing, and does not appear under Starter ($16/mo). Our own export guide, written in May 2026, records it as available on "Starter and above". Either the feature moved up a tier or one of those two sources is stale. We are flagging it as a discrepancy rather than resolving it, because the answer determines whether the cheapest paid plan can export at all.

Quick verdict

Base44 and Bolt are closer products in September 2026 than they were in May. Both now generate an app, host it, give it a database, and handle sign-in. The decision has moved off the feature list and onto one question: on the day you want to stop using the tool, what are you holding? With Bolt you are holding an ordinary Vite or Next.js repository in your own GitHub account, with a database you can claim into your own Supabase organisation. With Base44 you are holding a repository that imports a closed-source SDK on every data fetch, and a schema file with no rows in it.

Choose Bolt.new if you want to own real code from minute one and your team is comfortable wiring up Supabase, Netlify, or Vercel for the runtime side. Choose Base44 if you want the entire stack hosted, integrated, and one-click. Both are AI-native. Both have the same class of regression-loop problem on long sessions. The decision is mostly about whether you want a platform or a tool.

Base44 vs Bolt pricing, re-verified September 2026

Both ladders below were read off the vendors' own pricing pages on 13 September 2026. Neither vendor's tier names or allowances appear on any of the pages currently ranking for this comparison, which is the main reason the cost sections elsewhere are wrong.

	Base44 (annual billing)	Bolt (monthly billing)
Free	$0 — 25 message credits, 100 integration credits, up to 5 apps	$0 — 300K tokens/day, 1M tokens/month, Bolt branding, up to 333k web requests, unlimited databases, website hosting
Entry paid	Starter $16/mo — 100 message + 2,000 integration credits, unlimited apps, in-app code edits, connect a domain	Pro $25/mo — no daily token limit, starts at 10M tokens/mo, no branding, custom domain, up to 1M web requests, token rollover
Mid	Builder $40/mo — 250 + 10,000 credits, AI model select, free domain for 1 year, GitHub integration	(Pro is the only individual paid tier)
Upper	Pro $80/mo — 500 + 20,000 credits, early access to beta features	—
Top	Elite $160/mo — 1,200 + 50,000 credits, premium support	—
Team	(not published as a separate tier)	Teams $30/mo per member — centralised billing, admin controls, private NPM registries
Enterprise	Custom	Custom

Two traps in reading that table side by side:

1. Base44's prices are annual-billing prices; Bolt's $25 is a monthly-billing price. Base44's FAQ states that annual billing saves 20 percent, applied to the monthly price multiplied by twelve — so the monthly-billed equivalents are roughly $20, $50, $100 and $200, which is exactly where the older "$20–$200" figures on every other comparison came from. Bolt advertises "save up to 28%" with yearly billing, so its annual-equivalent entry price lands lower than the $25 headline.
2. The units are not comparable. Base44 bills credits, Bolt bills tokens, and the two meter different things. That is worth its own section.

Base44's credit model: message credits vs integration credits

Base44 does not have one currency, it has two, and no comparison we could find mentions the second one. Every tier is quoted as N message credits plus M integration credits per month:

Plan	Message credits/mo	Integration credits/mo
Free	25	100
Starter	100	2,000
Builder	250	10,000
Pro	500	20,000
Elite	1,200	50,000

Base44's own tooltip on the pricing page describes credits as "your monthly usage allowance for AI messages and integration actions" and notes that "exact usage varies based on the action and the selected AI model." The practical reading: message credits are consumed by building, integration credits by the app running — every third-party action your live app takes draws down the second pool. An app that is finished but busy still burns integration credits. An app that is under heavy AI iteration but has no users burns message credits.

Base44's FAQ adds that you can top up mid-cycle if you run out, and that third-party services you connect (it names Stripe, SendGrid and OpenAI) bill you directly on their own pricing on top of the plan.

Bolt's token model: daily cap, rollover, and why large projects cost more

Bolt bills tokens, on a ladder with one structural feature its competitors do not have and one hard ceiling nobody states as a number:

• The free tier has two ceilings, not one. 300,000 tokens per day and 1 million tokens per month. You can exhaust the daily allowance in an afternoon and still be nowhere near the monthly one.
• Pro has no daily limit at all and starts at 10 million tokens per month.
• Unused paid tokens roll over for one additional month, valid for up to two months total, and Bolt's FAQ notes that you need an active paid subscription to access rolled-over tokens — cancel and they are gone.
• Teams tokens are per member and are not shared. A five-person team on Teams is five separate allowances, not one pool.

The part that actually predicts your bill is in Bolt's own FAQ answer to "What are tokens?": most token usage comes from syncing your project's file system to the AI, so the larger the project, the more tokens are spent per message. That is a cost curve, not a flat rate. It is also the cleanest explanation available of why Bolt feels cheap for a week and expensive in month three — and it is the mirror image of Base44's problem, where the cost of a large project shows up as regression loops rather than as line items.

What it actually costs to ship

Neither vendor's list price is the number you should budget from.

• Base44: subscription plus credit top-ups during the build phase, plus whatever your integrations bill directly. Runtime is included up to plan limits, which is genuinely one bill for most small apps.
• Bolt: subscription plus token overage on long sessions. Hosting and a database are now included, so the old "plus Supabase, plus Vercel" arithmetic only applies if you deliberately choose to bring your own — which Pro's "choice of database provider" line exists to let you do.

The variable that dominates both is iteration count, not tier. If you want a number for your own project rather than ours, run your own iteration profile against credit burn versus runtime spend — the ratio between build-phase and steady-state cost is where most of these budgets go wrong.

Feature parity: Base44 vs Bolt, line by line

Feature	Base44	Bolt
AI-native generation	Native	Native
Output language	React + Deno (Base44 flavor)	Any (Next.js, Vite, React, Svelte, Astro, etc.)
Database	Built-in entity store	Bolt Database by default; unlimited databases on all tiers; choice of provider on Pro+
Authentication	Email, OAuth, SSO	Email sign-up/login and Google SSO in Bolt Database; leaked-password protection on by default
Hosting	base44.app or custom domain	Website hosting on all tiers (bolt.host); custom domain on Pro+
Server-side rendering	No (CSR by default)	Yes (any framework you choose)
Code export	Yes — with @base44/sdk references (see caveats below)	Yes — ordinary project, owned from minute one
Real Node.js runtime	No	Yes (WebContainer)
Terminal access	No	Yes (real terminal in browser)
Package install (npm)	Limited via Deno	Yes (full npm in WebContainer)
GitHub integration	Two-way GitHub sync (vendor claim — see export caveats); listed under Builder/Pro/Elite highlights	Auto-commit on every non-breaking change; pulls external commits every 30s; merges happen on GitHub, not in Bolt
Deploy targets	Base44 only	Bolt hosting, Netlify, or anywhere you push the repo
Multi-framework support	React only	Any JavaScript framework
Integrated backend	Yes (Deno functions)	Yes (Bolt Database, or Supabase edge functions if you choose Supabase)

The four rows that flipped this year — database, authentication, hosting, integrated backend — are the four rows the rest of this SERP still has the other way round.

Code ownership: what "nothing is locked to the platform" leaves out

Bolt still wins this category, but the reason has narrowed to something you can test in ten minutes rather than something you have to take on faith.

What the Base44 export actually contains

Base44's pricing page says nothing is locked to the platform. Here is what the export produces, from our own documented runs:

• Your React frontend, the Tailwind config and design tokens, and your backend function source (Deno-flavored TypeScript).
• A schema.json describing each entity and its fields.
• A package.json, a Vite setup, and a structure — src/components, src/pages, src/integrations, backend/functions — that any React developer will recognise.

And here is what it does not contain: the @base44/sdk source, and your data. The SDK is closed-source, it authenticates only against Base44, and the exported code imports it on every data fetch. Clone the repo, npm install, npm run dev, and the UI renders — then every read and write fails:

[base44/sdk] Authentication failed: invalid app_id

schema.json gives you the shape of your data. It gives you none of the rows; pulling those is a separate operation, either through Base44's per-entity CSV export or a paginated script against the SDK while you still have platform access. The full teardown is in what the GitHub export actually ships.

So both halves of the vendor's claim are true in a narrow sense and misleading together: the source code does leave, and the application does not. Replacing every SDK call, standing up the database and re-wiring auth is the whole job — we run it as a fixed-price Base44 migration with the data move scoped up front.

Where Bolt's portability is genuinely better

Test the same way and Bolt passes. The repo in your GitHub account is an ordinary project with no vendor SDK between your components and your data, which means the AI is removable without the app breaking — paste the same prompts into Cursor tomorrow and continue, or stop using an AI at all.

The caveat, and it is a real one now that Bolt has its own backend: your code is portable, your Bolt Database is not, by default. If you want the data to leave with the repo, Bolt's docs describe claiming the Bolt Database into your own Supabase organisation — which requires you to be the Supabase org owner, and which is one-way. Bolt's documentation states there is no supported flow for migrating a Supabase database back to a Bolt database, and that Bolt's own version-history restore does not cover Supabase databases once you have moved. Decide which side of that line you want to be on at project creation, not at exit; Bolt's docs note that switching a project from Bolt Database to Supabase later "requires extra steps."

Where Bolt's two-way sync has its own sharp edge

Bolt's GitHub integration is genuinely first-class — it commits automatically on every change that does not break the project, and polls GitHub every 30 seconds to pull in commits made outside Bolt. Two behaviours in that design are worth knowing before you put a team on it, and both come from Bolt's own documentation:

• If Bolt and GitHub update at almost the same moment, Bolt keeps its version and overwrites the GitHub one. Bolt is the winner in a write conflict, not your repo.
• Branch merges happen on GitHub, not in Bolt, and only the project owner can connect or manage the integration — collaborators' changes sync the next time the owner opens the project.
• Disconnecting a project from its repository is permanent from the UI; reconnecting the same repo requires contacting support.

None of that is disqualifying. It is the kind of thing that costs a team an afternoon precisely once, and it is the sort of detail a feature table cannot carry.

Speed to working prototype

Base44's time from prompt to clickable CRUD app with auth and database: 2 to 6 hours. Bolt.new's time from prompt to clickable CRUD app with auth and database: 4 to 12 hours.

That gap has narrowed since those timings were taken, and the reason is the one above: the hour or three that used to go into provisioning Supabase, wiring auth and deploying to Netlify is now optional on Bolt rather than mandatory. Bolt Database and Bolt hosting are defaults, and a new Bolt project has sign-in available without a second vendor in the loop.

Base44 is still ahead on the first afternoon, because its agent generates against a data model it already knows about, and because there is no database concept to choose at all. For a "this afternoon" deadline, Base44 wins. For a "this weekend" deadline, the gap is now small. For a "this month" deadline, Bolt wins, because the code you build on it is more maintainable and the exit is not a project.

Production readiness: Base44 and Bolt

Base44's production gaps:

1. CSR-by-default makes SEO impossible without manual SSR engineering.
2. AI regression loops at scale.
3. No SLA on lower tiers.
4. Vendor lock-in via the SDK and entity helpers — the export leaves, the running application does not.
5. Production tooling (staging, rollback, observability) is light.

Bolt's production gaps:

1. WebContainer is a development sandbox with memory and CPU caps, and large projects with heavy build steps slow down or fail in it. Note the correction: this used to read "you must deploy elsewhere," which is no longer true — Bolt hosts published sites itself, on every tier. The constraint is on the dev loop, not on the runtime.
2. Token cost scales with project size, because most token usage is file-system sync — the same project gets more expensive per message as it grows.
3. AI agent quality varies; Bolt sometimes generates code that compiles but is structurally messy.
4. No native testing harness — you wire it up yourself.
5. Bolt is the winner in a Bolt-versus-GitHub write conflict, and version-history restore does not cover a database you have claimed into Supabase.

Both ship production apps every day. Bolt's output is a normal Vite or Next.js app, which is a well-understood stack whether it runs on Bolt hosting or somewhere you chose. Base44's production deployments live on Base44, which centralises risk in a way that is fine until it is not.

Best fit for use case

Use case	Winner	Why
Fastest possible MVP	Base44	Zero provisioning, agent knows the data model
Code-quality-first MVP	Bolt.new	Real code, real structure, no SDK in the data path
Multi-framework projects	Bolt.new	Supports any JS framework
Internal tool with auth + DB	Tie	Both bundle a database and sign-in now; pick on who maintains it
SaaS product needing SSR	Bolt.new	Pick Next.js, get SSR
App you intend to deploy to your own AWS/GCP	Bolt.new	Code is portable — claim the Bolt Database into Supabase first, or the data stays behind
AI feature-heavy app	Tie	Both have AI native
Solo founder shipping fast	Base44	One platform, one bill
Team with senior developers	Bolt.new	Real dev workflow, real branches
Educational / learning project	Bolt.new	Real code is more pedagogical
Mobile native build (Capacitor)	Tie	Both wrap; neither is native

Two of those rows deserve their own page rather than a table cell. If the only thing you are optimising for is getting a paid MVP in front of users, we judge the same two tools on that single criterion in Base44 vs Bolt.new for an MVP. And if what you actually want is another AI-native platform rather than a browser IDE, the closer head-to-head is Base44 vs Lovable — Lovable sits on the same side of the platform-versus-tool line that Base44 does, so the trade-offs land differently than they do here.

The honest negative

Where Base44 is genuinely worse than Bolt:

• Vendor lock-in is structural. Not because the code will not export — it does — but because the exported code cannot run without a closed-source SDK that only talks to Base44.
• Multi-framework choice. Bolt supports anything. Base44 supports React.
• Real terminal and npm. Bolt gives you a real Node environment. Base44 gives you Deno functions.
• Code structure. Bolt's output looks like a normal project. Base44's output looks like generated platform output.
• Deployment flexibility. Bolt deploys to its own hosting or anywhere you push the repo. Base44 deploys to Base44.
• GitHub workflow. Bolt commits continuously to a repo you own. Base44's sync is a plan-gated feature whose tier placement we could not reconcile between two sources.

Where Bolt is genuinely worse than Base44:

• More surface to understand. Bolt now includes a backend, but it also asks you to decide between Bolt Database and Supabase at project creation, and that decision is awkward to reverse. Base44 asks you nothing.
• WebContainer limitations. Memory and CPU caps in the browser sandbox slow down or break large projects.
• Token cost rises with project size, by the vendor's own explanation of what tokens are spent on.
• Less integrated AI agent. Base44's agent knows about the platform's data model. Bolt's agent has to be told.
• Sync semantics favour the tool. In a simultaneous-write conflict Bolt overwrites GitHub, and version-history restore does not cover a claimed Supabase database.
• Reliability of WebContainer. Bolt has had outages and slowdowns from WebContainer issues. Base44's runtime is more boring.

The old summary of this comparison — "Bolt is AI in a real dev environment, Base44 is AI on a hosted platform" — is now only half right. Both are hosted platforms. Only one of them hands you something that still runs after you stop paying for it.

What it costs if you hire this out

Most people arriving at this comparison are choosing between two subscriptions. A third of them are actually choosing between three options, and the third one is not a subscription.

If you are already on Base44 and the comparison is really an exit plan, the cost is not the Bolt subscription, it is the rebuild of everything the SDK was doing. Our own export guide puts that at 80 to 200 focused engineer-hours to replace SDK calls, stand up a new backend, wire auth and redeploy — which is where the site's migration pricing of $6,000 for a small app, $12,000 for medium and $25,000+ for complex comes from. The export itself is free. Making it leave the platform is not.

If you have not committed to either tool yet, the honest framing is that you are about to spend several weeks learning a builder in order to ship one app. If the comparison is really "which one do I learn", the third option is neither: a done-for-you Base44 build hands back a working app and the code, and skips the tool-evaluation phase entirely. It is the right answer less often than the two subscriptions are, but it is the right answer often enough that leaving it off the table is dishonest.

If you are somewhere in the middle — an app that half-works, on a platform you are no longer sure about — the cheapest next step is a read on the app itself rather than on the category. Fix work on this site starts at $1,500 for a scoped sprint, which is usually less than a month of the wrong platform decision.

Choosing, then leaving: what to do next

This page is about choosing. If you have already chosen and what you need is the sequence of steps, that is a different document: the Base44 to Bolt migration playbook covers the actual path — what to export, what to rebuild, what to leave behind, and in what order.

If you want the decision made against your actual app rather than against a feature table, the $497 Base44 audit returns a platform-fit read, a cost projection, and a 12-month risk assessment on the app you already have.

Related comparisons

• Compare hub — full matrix across Base44, Lovable, Bubble, Replit, Webflow, FlutterFlow, and Glide.
• Base44 vs Bolt.new for an MVP — the same two platforms judged only on getting an MVP in front of paying users.
• Base44 vs Lovable — the closest AI-native head-to-head.
• Base44 vs Replit — another browser-based dev environment comparison.
• Base44 export code guide — the actual exit cost.
• Written by the Lead Engineer at Base44Devs from production builds and migrations.

Both vendors' pricing pages, and Bolt's product documentation on databases, authentication and GitHub sync, were read on 13 September 2026. Base44 tier prices are the annual-billing figures shown on base44.com/pricing; Bolt's are the monthly-billing figures shown on bolt.new/pricing.