Alternatives to Firebase logo

Alternatives to Firebase

Parse, MongoDB, Heroku, Auth0, and Realm are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Firebase.
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What is Firebase and what are its top alternatives?

Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
Firebase is a tool in the Realtime Backend / API category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Firebase

  • Parse
    Parse

    With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch a full-featured app in record time without ever worrying about server management. We offer push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code. ...

  • MongoDB
    MongoDB

    MongoDB stores data in JSON-like documents that can vary in structure, offering a dynamic, flexible schema. MongoDB was also designed for high availability and scalability, with built-in replication and auto-sharding. ...

  • Heroku
    Heroku

    Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling. ...

  • Auth0
    Auth0

    A set of unified APIs and tools that instantly enables Single Sign On and user management to all your applications. ...

  • Realm
    Realm

    The Realm Mobile Platform is a next-generation data layer for applications. Realm is reactive, concurrent, and lightweight, allowing you to work with live, native objects. ...

  • Contentful
    Contentful

    With Contentful, you can bring your content anywhere using our APIs, completely customize your content structure all while using your preferred programming languages and frameworks. ...

  • Couchbase
    Couchbase

    Developed as an alternative to traditionally inflexible SQL databases, the Couchbase NoSQL database is built on an open source foundation and architected to help developers solve real-world problems and meet high scalability demands. ...

  • Google Cloud Storage
    Google Cloud Storage

    Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storing and retrieval of any amount of data and at any time. It provides a simple programming interface which enables developers to take advantage of Google's own reliable and fast networking infrastructure to perform data operations in a secure and cost effective manner. If expansion needs arise, developers can benefit from the scalability provided by Google's infrastructure. ...

Firebase alternatives & related posts

Parse logo

Parse

489
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600
The complete mobile app platform
489
478
+ 1
600
PROS OF PARSE
  • 118
    Easy setup
  • 78
    Free hosting
  • 62
    Well-documented
  • 52
    Cheap
  • 47
    Use push notifications in 3 lines of code
  • 41
    Fast
  • 39
    Cloud code
  • 32
    Good for prototypes
  • 31
    Cloud modules
  • 27
    Backed by facebook
  • 7
    Cross Platform
  • 7
    Parse Push
  • 6
    Parse Analytics
  • 6
    Multiplatform
  • 6
    Parse Core
  • 5
    Quick chat and profile capabilities
  • 5
    Free Tier
  • 5
    Cloud Based
  • 4
    Free
  • 4
    Nice security concept
  • 3
    Backbone Models
  • 3
    Local Datastore
  • 3
    Backend as a service
  • 3
    Geopoints
  • 2
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Anonymous Users
  • 2
    About to Die
CONS OF PARSE
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Parse posts

    MongoDB logo

    MongoDB

    90.9K
    78.5K
    4.1K
    The database for giant ideas
    90.9K
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    + 1
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    PROS OF MONGODB
    • 827
      Document-oriented storage
    • 593
      No sql
    • 553
      Ease of use
    • 464
      Fast
    • 410
      High performance
    • 257
      Free
    • 218
      Open source
    • 180
      Flexible
    • 145
      Replication & high availability
    • 112
      Easy to maintain
    • 42
      Querying
    • 39
      Easy scalability
    • 38
      Auto-sharding
    • 37
      High availability
    • 31
      Map/reduce
    • 27
      Document database
    • 25
      Easy setup
    • 25
      Full index support
    • 16
      Reliable
    • 15
      Fast in-place updates
    • 14
      Agile programming, flexible, fast
    • 12
      No database migrations
    • 8
      Easy integration with Node.Js
    • 8
      Enterprise
    • 6
      Enterprise Support
    • 5
      Great NoSQL DB
    • 4
      Support for many languages through different drivers
    • 3
      Drivers support is good
    • 3
      Aggregation Framework
    • 3
      Schemaless
    • 2
      Fast
    • 2
      Managed service
    • 2
      Easy to Scale
    • 2
      Awesome
    • 2
      Consistent
    • 1
      Good GUI
    • 1
      Acid Compliant
    CONS OF MONGODB
    • 6
      Very slowly for connected models that require joins
    • 3
      Not acid compliant
    • 1
      Proprietary query language

    related MongoDB posts

    Jeyabalaji Subramanian

    Recently we were looking at a few robust and cost-effective ways of replicating the data that resides in our production MongoDB to a PostgreSQL database for data warehousing and business intelligence.

    We set ourselves the following criteria for the optimal tool that would do this job: - The data replication must be near real-time, yet it should NOT impact the production database - The data replication must be horizontally scalable (based on the load), asynchronous & crash-resilient

    Based on the above criteria, we selected the following tools to perform the end to end data replication:

    We chose MongoDB Stitch for picking up the changes in the source database. It is the serverless platform from MongoDB. One of the services offered by MongoDB Stitch is Stitch Triggers. Using stitch triggers, you can execute a serverless function (in Node.js) in real time in response to changes in the database. When there are a lot of database changes, Stitch automatically "feeds forward" these changes through an asynchronous queue.

    We chose Amazon SQS as the pipe / message backbone for communicating the changes from MongoDB to our own replication service. Interestingly enough, MongoDB stitch offers integration with AWS services.

    In the Node.js function, we wrote minimal functionality to communicate the database changes (insert / update / delete / replace) to Amazon SQS.

    Next we wrote a minimal micro-service in Python to listen to the message events on SQS, pickup the data payload & mirror the DB changes on to the target Data warehouse. We implemented source data to target data translation by modelling target table structures through SQLAlchemy . We deployed this micro-service as AWS Lambda with Zappa. With Zappa, deploying your services as event-driven & horizontally scalable Lambda service is dumb-easy.

    In the end, we got to implement a highly scalable near realtime Change Data Replication service that "works" and deployed to production in a matter of few days!

    See more
    Robert Zuber

    We use MongoDB as our primary #datastore. Mongo's approach to replica sets enables some fantastic patterns for operations like maintenance, backups, and #ETL.

    As we pull #microservices from our #monolith, we are taking the opportunity to build them with their own datastores using PostgreSQL. We also use Redis to cache data we’d never store permanently, and to rate-limit our requests to partners’ APIs (like GitHub).

    When we’re dealing with large blobs of immutable data (logs, artifacts, and test results), we store them in Amazon S3. We handle any side-effects of S3’s eventual consistency model within our own code. This ensures that we deal with user requests correctly while writes are in process.

    See more
    Heroku logo

    Heroku

    25.2K
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    3.2K
    Build, deliver, monitor and scale web apps and APIs with a trail blazing developer experience.
    25.2K
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    PROS OF HEROKU
    • 703
      Easy deployment
    • 459
      Free for side projects
    • 374
      Huge time-saver
    • 348
      Simple scaling
    • 261
      Low devops skills required
    • 190
      Easy setup
    • 174
      Add-ons for almost everything
    • 153
      Beginner friendly
    • 150
      Better for startups
    • 133
      Low learning curve
    • 48
      Postgres hosting
    • 41
      Easy to add collaborators
    • 30
      Faster development
    • 24
      Awesome documentation
    • 19
      Simple rollback
    • 19
      Focus on product, not deployment
    • 15
      Natural companion for rails development
    • 15
      Easy integration
    • 12
      Great customer support
    • 8
      GitHub integration
    • 6
      Painless & well documented
    • 6
      No-ops
    • 4
      I love that they make it free to launch a side project
    • 4
      Free
    • 3
      Great UI
    • 3
      Just works
    • 2
      PostgreSQL forking and following
    • 2
      MySQL extension
    • 1
      Security
    • 1
      Able to host stuff good like Discord Bot
    • 0
      Sec
    CONS OF HEROKU
    • 27
      Super expensive
    • 9
      Not a whole lot of flexibility
    • 7
      No usable MySQL option
    • 7
      Storage
    • 5
      Low performance on free tier
    • 2
      24/7 support is $1,000 per month

    related Heroku posts

    Russel Werner
    Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 32 upvotes · 1.9M views

    StackShare Feed is built entirely with React, Glamorous, and Apollo. One of our objectives with the public launch of the Feed was to enable a Server-side rendered (SSR) experience for our organic search traffic. When you visit the StackShare Feed, and you aren't logged in, you are delivered the Trending feed experience. We use an in-house Node.js rendering microservice to generate this HTML. This microservice needs to run and serve requests independent of our Rails web app. Up until recently, we had a mono-repo with our Rails and React code living happily together and all served from the same web process. In order to deploy our SSR app into a Heroku environment, we needed to split out our front-end application into a separate repo in GitHub. The driving factor in this decision was mostly due to limitations imposed by Heroku specifically with how processes can't communicate with each other. A new SSR app was created in Heroku and linked directly to the frontend repo so it stays in-sync with changes.

    Related to this, we need a way to "deploy" our frontend changes to various server environments without building & releasing the entire Ruby application. We built a hybrid Amazon S3 Amazon CloudFront solution to host our Webpack bundles. A new CircleCI script builds the bundles and uploads them to S3. The final step in our rollout is to update some keys in Redis so our Rails app knows which bundles to serve. The result of these efforts were significant. Our frontend team now moves independently of our backend team, our build & release process takes only a few minutes, we are now using an edge CDN to serve JS assets, and we have pre-rendered React pages!

    #StackDecisionsLaunch #SSR #Microservices #FrontEndRepoSplit

    See more
    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

    Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

    • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
    • Respectively Git as revision control system
    • SourceTree as Git GUI
    • Visual Studio Code as IDE
    • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
    • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
    • SonarQube as quality gate
    • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
    • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
    • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
    • Heroku for deploying in test environments
    • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
    • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
    • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
    • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
    • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

    The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

    • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
    • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
    • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
    • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
    • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
    • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
    See more
    Auth0 logo

    Auth0

    1.3K
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    Token-based Single Sign On for your Apps and APIs with social, databases and enterprise identities
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    PROS OF AUTH0
    • 69
      JSON web token
    • 31
      Integration with 20+ Social Providers
    • 20
      It's a universal solution
    • 20
      SDKs
    • 15
      Amazing Documentation
    • 11
      Heroku Add-on
    • 8
      Enterprise support
    • 7
      Great Sample Repos
    • 7
      Extend platform with "rules"
    • 4
      Azure Add-on
    • 3
      Easy integration, non-intrusive identity provider
    • 3
      Passwordless
    • 2
      It can integrate seamlessly with firebase
    • 2
      Great documentation, samples, UX and Angular support
    • 2
      Polished
    • 2
      On-premise deployment
    • 1
      Will sign BAA for HIPAA-compliance
    • 1
      MFA
    • 1
      Active Directory support
    • 1
      Springboot
    • 1
      SOC2
    • 1
      SAML Support
    • 1
      Great support
    • 1
      OpenID Connect (OIDC) Support
    CONS OF AUTH0
    • 14
      Pricing too high (Developer Pro)
    • 7
      Poor support
    • 4
      Rapidly changing API
    • 4
      Status page not reflect actual status

    related Auth0 posts

    Stephen Gheysens
    Lead Solutions Engineer at Inscribe · | 14 upvotes · 1.8M views

    Hi Otensia! I'd definitely recommend using the skills you've already got and building with JavaScript is a smart way to go these days. Most platform services have JavaScript/Node SDKs or NPM packages, many serverless platforms support Node in case you need to write any backend logic, and JavaScript is incredibly popular - meaning it will be easy to hire for, should you ever need to.

    My advice would be "don't reinvent the wheel". If you already have a skill set that will work well to solve the problem at hand, and you don't need it for any other projects, don't spend the time jumping into a new language. If you're looking for an excuse to learn something new, it would be better to invest that time in learning a new platform/tool that compliments your knowledge of JavaScript. For this project, I might recommend using Netlify, Vercel, or Google Firebase to quickly and easily deploy your web app. If you need to add user authentication, there are great examples out there for Firebase Authentication, Auth0, or even Magic (a newcomer on the Auth scene, but very user friendly). All of these services work very well with a JavaScript-based application.

    See more

    Hey all, We're currently weighing up the pros & cons of using Firebase Authentication vs something more OTB like Auth0 or Okta to manage end-user access management for a consumer digital content product. From what I understand so far, Something like Firebase Auth would require more dev effort but is likely to cost less overall, whereas OTB, you have a UI-based console which makes config by non-technical business users easier to manage. Does anyone else have any intuitions or experiences they could share on this, please? Thank you!

    See more
    Realm logo

    Realm

    268
    440
    16
    Realm makes it easy to build reactive apps, realtime collaborative features, and offline-first experiences.
    268
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    + 1
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    PROS OF REALM
    • 7
      Good
    • 3
      Elegant API
    • 3
      Cloud Syncing
    • 2
      React Native Support
    • 1
      Strong Adoption Growth
    CONS OF REALM
    • 1
      No offline support for web till now

    related Realm posts

    Contentful logo

    Contentful

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    70
    Contentful is a cloud-based API-first content platform
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    PROS OF CONTENTFUL
    • 30
      API-based cms
    • 17
      Much better than WordPress
    • 11
      Simple and customizable
    • 5
      Images API
    • 3
      Free for small projects
    • 1
      Extensible dashboard UI
    • 1
      Super simple to integrate
    • 1
      Managed Service
    • 1
      Tag Manager like UI
    CONS OF CONTENTFUL
    • 5
      No spell check
    • 5
      No repeater Field
    • 4
      No free plan
    • 3
      Slow dashboard
    • 2
      Enterprise targeted
    • 2
      Pricey
    • 2
      Limited content types
    • 1
      Not scalable
    • 1
      No GraphQL API

    related Contentful posts

    Hi, I went through a comprehensive analysis - of headless/api content management systems - essentially to store content "bits" and publish them where needed (website, 3rd party sites, social media, etc.). I had considered many other solutions but ultimately chose Directus. I believe that was a good choice.

    I had strongly considered Contentful, Strapi, Sanity, and hygraph. Hygraph came in #2 and contentful #3.

    Ultimately I liked directus for:

    (1) time in business

    (2) open source

    (3) integration with n8n and Pipedream

    (4) pricing

    (5) extensibility

    Thoughts? Was this a good choice? We have many WordPress sites we're not (at least now) looking to replace with Directus, but instead to push to.

    I'd love some feedback.

    See more
    Shared insights
    on
    ContentfulContentfulFirebaseFirebase

    Hi. I am gonna build a simple app for a company to ease their work. The company is sending out pdf files to their users' email. The data is a health analysis with a lot of different health values. The app should be an MVP, where users can watch their data instead of opening a pdf file. The company should be able to fill in the data in either Firebase or Contentful database. Is Contentful or Firebase best for this solution? What is your opinion?

    See more
    Couchbase logo

    Couchbase

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    110
    Document-Oriented NoSQL Database
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    PROS OF COUCHBASE
    • 18
      High performance
    • 18
      Flexible data model, easy scalability, extremely fast
    • 9
      Mobile app support
    • 7
      You can query it with Ansi-92 SQL
    • 6
      All nodes can be read/write
    • 5
      Equal nodes in cluster, allowing fast, flexible changes
    • 5
      Both a key-value store and document (JSON) db
    • 5
      Open source, community and enterprise editions
    • 4
      Automatic configuration of sharding
    • 4
      Local cache capability
    • 3
      Easy setup
    • 3
      Linearly scalable, useful to large number of tps
    • 3
      Easy cluster administration
    • 3
      Cross data center replication
    • 3
      SDKs in popular programming languages
    • 3
      Elasticsearch connector
    • 3
      Web based management, query and monitoring panel
    • 2
      Map reduce views
    • 2
      DBaaS available
    • 2
      NoSQL
    • 1
      Buckets, Scopes, Collections & Documents
    • 1
      FTS + SQL together
    CONS OF COUCHBASE
    • 3
      Terrible query language

    related Couchbase posts

    Gabriel Pa

    We implemented our first large scale EPR application from naologic.com using CouchDB .

    Very fast, replication works great, doesn't consume much RAM, queries are blazing fast but we found a problem: the queries were very hard to write, it took a long time to figure out the API, we had to go and write our own @nodejs library to make it work properly.

    It lost most of its support. Since then, we migrated to Couchbase and the learning curve was steep but all worth it. Memcached indexing out of the box, full text search works great.

    See more
    Ilias Mentzelos
    Software Engineer at Plum Fintech · | 9 upvotes · 130.4K views
    Shared insights
    on
    MongoDBMongoDBCouchbaseCouchbase

    Hey, we want to build a referral campaign mechanism that will probably contain millions of records within the next few years. We want fast read access based on IDs or some indexes, and isolation is crucial as some listeners will try to update the same document at the same time. What's your suggestion between Couchbase and MongoDB? Thanks!

    See more
    Google Cloud Storage logo

    Google Cloud Storage

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    Durable and highly available object storage service
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    PROS OF GOOGLE CLOUD STORAGE
    • 28
      Scalable
    • 19
      Cheap
    • 14
      Reliable
    • 9
      Easy
    • 3
      Chealp
    • 1
      More praticlal and easy
    CONS OF GOOGLE CLOUD STORAGE
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Google Cloud Storage posts

      Aliadoc Team

      In #Aliadoc, we're exploring the crowdfunding option to get traction before launch. We are building a SaaS platform for website design customization.

      For the Admin UI and website editor we use React and we're currently transitioning from a Create React App setup to a custom one because our needs have become more specific. We use CloudFlare as much as possible, it's a great service.

      For routing dynamic resources and proxy tasks to feed websites to the editor we leverage CloudFlare Workers for improved responsiveness. We use Firebase for our hosting needs and user authentication while also using several Cloud Functions for Firebase to interact with other services along with Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage, but also the Real Time Database is on the radar for collaborative website editing.

      We generally hate configuration but honestly because of the stage of our project we lack resources for doing heavy sysops work. So we are basically just relying on Serverless technologies as much as we can to do all server side processing.

      Visual Studio Code definitively makes programming a much easier and enjoyable task, we just love it. We combine it with Bitbucket for our source code control needs.

      See more