Alternatives to Back4App logo

Alternatives to Back4App

Heroku, Firebase, Parse, Backendless, and Kinvey are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Back4App.
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What is Back4App and what are its top alternatives?

Back4App is a backend as a service (BaaS) platform that allows developers to build, host, and manage applications. Key features include real-time database, cloud code functions, user authentication, push notifications, data migration, and more. However, some limitations of Back4App include limited free tier options, lack of advanced analytics, and potential scalability challenges for high-traffic applications.

  1. Firebase: Firebase is a comprehensive mobile and web application development platform with features like real-time database, authentication, hosting, and analytics. Firebase offers a generous free tier and easy integration with Google services, but some users may find it less flexible compared to Back4App.
  2. AWS Amplify: AWS Amplify is a full-stack development platform that provides tools for building scalable and secure applications. It offers features like authentication, API creation, and hosting, but users may experience a steeper learning curve compared to Back4App.
  3. Parse Platform: Parse Platform is an open-source framework for building mobile and web applications. It offers features like data storage, user authentication, and push notifications. While Parse Platform provides flexibility and control, users may need to handle hosting and maintenance themselves.
  4. Backendless: Backendless is a mobile backend as a service provider with features like real-time database, user management, push notifications, and hosting. It offers a drag-and-drop interface for easy development but may have limitations in customization compared to Back4App.
  5. Heroku: Heroku is a cloud platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and scale applications. It supports multiple programming languages and frameworks, making it versatile for various projects. However, users may face higher costs for scaling compared to Back4App.
  6. Kinvey: Kinvey is a BaaS provider that offers features like data integration, user authentication, and cloud caching. It provides enterprise-grade security but may have a complex pricing structure compared to Back4App.
  7. DigitalOcean App Platform: DigitalOcean App Platform is a platform as a service (PaaS) that simplifies application deployment and scaling. It supports various programming languages and database options, but users may require additional configuration compared to Back4App.
  8. Kuzzle: Kuzzle is an open-source backend platform with features like real-time data synchronization, authentication, and geofencing. It provides flexibility for customization but users may need to handle hosting and infrastructure management themselves.
  9. Supabase: Supabase is an open-source platform that offers features like real-time database, authentication, and serverless functions. It provides high scalability and flexibility for development, but users may need to manage hosting and maintenance themselves.
  10. DreamFactory: DreamFactory is an open-source API automation platform that simplifies backend development with features like API creation, data integration, and authentication. It offers flexibility for customization but users may require technical expertise for setup and management.

Top Alternatives to Back4App

  • 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. ...

  • Firebase
    Firebase

    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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • Backendless
    Backendless

    It is a development and runtime platform which simplifies and shortens mobile application development process. The platform removes the need to develop backend functionality by providing reusable server-side services via APIs. The APIs are packaged into native libraries available for all major client-side environments - Andoid, iOS, JavaScript, .NET, ActionScript and REST. The default backend logic can be modified with custom server-side code. The platform is available as an online service and a downloadable Enterprise product which can be deployed in any environment. ...

  • Kinvey
    Kinvey

    Kinvey makes it ridiculously easy for developers to setup, use and operate a cloud backend for their mobile apps. They don't have to worry about connecting to various cloud services, setting up servers for their backend, or maintaining and scaling them. ...

  • Parse-Server
    Parse-Server

    A Parse.com API compatible router package for Express. Read the announcement blog post here: http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-parse-server-and-the-database-migration-tool/. Read the migration guide here: https://parse.com/docs/server/guide#migrating ...

  • NGINX
    NGINX

    nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018. ...

  • Apache HTTP Server
    Apache HTTP Server

    The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet. ...

Back4App alternatives & related posts

Heroku logo

Heroku

25.6K
3.2K
Build, deliver, monitor and scale web apps and APIs with a trail blazing developer experience.
25.6K
3.2K
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 · 2.9M 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 · 11.9M 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
Firebase logo

Firebase

41.3K
2K
The Realtime App Platform
41.3K
2K
PROS OF FIREBASE
  • 371
    Realtime backend made easy
  • 270
    Fast and responsive
  • 242
    Easy setup
  • 215
    Real-time
  • 191
    JSON
  • 134
    Free
  • 128
    Backed by google
  • 83
    Angular adaptor
  • 68
    Reliable
  • 36
    Great customer support
  • 32
    Great documentation
  • 25
    Real-time synchronization
  • 21
    Mobile friendly
  • 19
    Rapid prototyping
  • 14
    Great security
  • 12
    Automatic scaling
  • 11
    Freakingly awesome
  • 8
    Super fast development
  • 8
    Angularfire is an amazing addition!
  • 8
    Chat
  • 6
    Firebase hosting
  • 6
    Built in user auth/oauth
  • 6
    Awesome next-gen backend
  • 6
    Ios adaptor
  • 4
    Speed of light
  • 4
    Very easy to use
  • 3
    Great
  • 3
    It's made development super fast
  • 3
    Brilliant for startups
  • 2
    Free hosting
  • 2
    Cloud functions
  • 2
    JS Offline and Sync suport
  • 2
    Low battery consumption
  • 2
    .net
  • 2
    The concurrent updates create a great experience
  • 2
    Push notification
  • 2
    I can quickly create static web apps with no backend
  • 2
    Great all-round functionality
  • 2
    Free authentication solution
  • 1
    Easy Reactjs integration
  • 1
    Google's support
  • 1
    Free SSL
  • 1
    CDN & cache out of the box
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Large
  • 1
    Faster workflow
  • 1
    Serverless
  • 1
    Good Free Limits
  • 1
    Simple and easy
CONS OF FIREBASE
  • 31
    Can become expensive
  • 16
    No open source, you depend on external company
  • 15
    Scalability is not infinite
  • 9
    Not Flexible Enough
  • 7
    Cant filter queries
  • 3
    Very unstable server
  • 3
    No Relational Data
  • 2
    Too many errors
  • 2
    No offline sync

related Firebase 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
Eugene Cheah

For inboxkitten.com, an opensource disposable email service;

We migrated our serverless workload from Cloud Functions for Firebase to CloudFlare workers, taking advantage of the lower cost and faster-performing edge computing of Cloudflare network. Made possible due to our extremely low CPU and RAM overhead of our serverless functions.

If I were to summarize the limitation of Cloudflare (as oppose to firebase/gcp functions), it would be ...

  1. <5ms CPU time limit
  2. Incompatible with express.js
  3. one script limitation per domain

Limitations our workload is able to conform with (YMMV)

For hosting of static files, we migrated from Firebase to CommonsHost

More details on the trade-off in between both serverless providers is in the article

See more
Parse logo

Parse

507
601
The complete mobile app platform
507
601
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
    Parse Push
  • 7
    Cross Platform
  • 6
    Parse Analytics
  • 6
    Multiplatform
  • 6
    Parse Core
  • 5
    Quick chat and profile capabilities
  • 5
    Free Tier
  • 5
    Cloud Based
  • 4
    Nice security concept
  • 4
    Free
  • 3
    About to Die
  • 3
    Local Datastore
  • 3
    Backend as a service
  • 3
    Backbone Models
  • 3
    Geopoints
  • 2
    Anonymous Users
  • 2
    Easy to use
CONS OF PARSE
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Parse posts

    Backendless logo

    Backendless

    15
    0
    A mobile Backend as a Service (mBaaS) platform
    15
    0
    PROS OF BACKENDLESS
      Be the first to leave a pro
      CONS OF BACKENDLESS
        Be the first to leave a con

        related Backendless posts

        Kinvey logo

        Kinvey

        20
        13
        Cloud Backend as a Service for any app.
        20
        13
        PROS OF KINVEY
        • 5
          Easy setup
        • 2
          Excellent documentation
        • 2
          Great free tier for testing prototypes
        • 2
          MongoDB
        • 1
          Will be discontinued sometime in 2023
        • 1
          Great customer support
        CONS OF KINVEY
        • 1
          Base plan starts at $2,500 / year

        related Kinvey posts

        Parse-Server logo

        Parse-Server

        191
        32
        Parse-compatible API server module for Node/Express
        191
        32
        PROS OF PARSE-SERVER
        • 13
          Open Source
        • 7
          Well documented
        • 4
          Easy setup, easy api, Fast,more platforms,realtime
        • 3
          No vendor lock-in
        • 2
          JSON
        • 2
          Backed by People
        • 1
          Friendly contributor community
        CONS OF PARSE-SERVER
        • 1
          No guarantee (comes as is)

        related Parse-Server posts

        NGINX logo

        NGINX

        113.7K
        5.5K
        A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.
        113.7K
        5.5K
        PROS OF NGINX
        • 1.4K
          High-performance http server
        • 894
          Performance
        • 730
          Easy to configure
        • 607
          Open source
        • 530
          Load balancer
        • 289
          Free
        • 288
          Scalability
        • 226
          Web server
        • 175
          Simplicity
        • 136
          Easy setup
        • 30
          Content caching
        • 21
          Web Accelerator
        • 15
          Capability
        • 14
          Fast
        • 12
          High-latency
        • 12
          Predictability
        • 8
          Reverse Proxy
        • 7
          Supports http/2
        • 7
          The best of them
        • 5
          Great Community
        • 5
          Lots of Modules
        • 5
          Enterprise version
        • 4
          High perfomance proxy server
        • 3
          Embedded Lua scripting
        • 3
          Streaming media delivery
        • 3
          Streaming media
        • 3
          Reversy Proxy
        • 2
          Blash
        • 2
          GRPC-Web
        • 2
          Lightweight
        • 2
          Fast and easy to set up
        • 2
          Slim
        • 2
          saltstack
        • 1
          Virtual hosting
        • 1
          Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
        • 1
          Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
        • 1
          Ingress controller
        CONS OF NGINX
        • 10
          Advanced features require subscription

        related NGINX posts

        Simon Reymann
        Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11.9M 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
        John-Daniel Trask
        Co-founder & CEO at Raygun · | 19 upvotes · 494.9K views

        We chose AWS because, at the time, it was really the only cloud provider to choose from.

        We tend to use their basic building blocks (EC2, ELB, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS) rather than vendor specific components like databases and queuing. We deliberately decided to do this to ensure we could provide multi-cloud support or potentially move to another cloud provider if the offering was better for our customers.

        We’ve utilized c3.large nodes for both the Node.js deployment and then for the .NET Core deployment. Both sit as backends behind an nginx instance and are managed using scaling groups in Amazon EC2 sitting behind a standard AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

        While we’re satisfied with AWS, we do review our decision each year and have looked at Azure and Google Cloud offerings.

        #CloudHosting #WebServers #CloudStorage #LoadBalancerReverseProxy

        See more
        Apache HTTP Server logo

        Apache HTTP Server

        64.6K
        1.4K
        Open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows
        64.6K
        1.4K
        PROS OF APACHE HTTP SERVER
        • 479
          Web server
        • 305
          Most widely-used web server
        • 217
          Virtual hosting
        • 148
          Fast
        • 138
          Ssl support
        • 44
          Since 1996
        • 28
          Asynchronous
        • 5
          Robust
        • 4
          Proven over many years
        • 2
          Mature
        • 2
          Perfomance
        • 1
          Perfect Support
        • 0
          Many available modules
        • 0
          Many available modules
        CONS OF APACHE HTTP SERVER
        • 4
          Hard to set up

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        Nick Rockwell
        SVP, Engineering at Fastly · | 46 upvotes · 4.2M views

        When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?

        So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.

        React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.

        Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.

        See more
        Tim Abbott
        Shared insights
        on
        NGINXNGINXApache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
        at

        We've been happy with nginx as part of our stack. As an open source web application that folks install on-premise, the configuration system for the webserver is pretty important to us. I have a few complaints (e.g. the configuration syntax for conditionals is a pain), but overall we've found it pretty easy to build a configurable set of options (see link) for how to run Zulip on nginx, both directly and with a remote reverse proxy in front of it, with a minimum of code duplication.

        Certainly I've been a lot happier with it than I was working with Apache HTTP Server in past projects.

        See more