Alternatives to Parse logo

Alternatives to Parse

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

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.
Parse is a tool in the Mobile Backend category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Parse

  • 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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • DreamFactory
    DreamFactory

    DreamFactory is an open source REST API backend for mobile, web, and IoT applications. It provides RESTful web services with pre-built connectors to SQL, NoSQL, file storage systems, and web services. It's secure, reusable, and offers live API documentation. ...

  • 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 ...

  • 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. ...

  • 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. ...

  • Amazon EC2
    Amazon EC2

    It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. ...

Parse alternatives & related posts

Firebase logo

Firebase

41K
2K
The Realtime App Platform
41K
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
Heroku logo

Heroku

25.5K
3.2K
Build, deliver, monitor and scale web apps and APIs with a trail blazing developer experience.
25.5K
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 · 2.8M 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 · 11.2M 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
DreamFactory logo

DreamFactory

40
21
Open source REST API backend for mobile, web, and IoT applications.
40
21
PROS OF DREAMFACTORY
  • 6
    Restful
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 5
    SQL Rest APIS
  • 2
    Love this to easily build API's
  • 1
    Great customer support
  • 1
    Multi Platform
CONS OF DREAMFACTORY
    Be the first to leave a con

    related DreamFactory 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

    Realm logo

    Realm

    269
    16
    Realm makes it easy to build reactive apps, realtime collaborative features, and offline-first experiences.
    269
    16
    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

    Mike Endale
    Shared insights
    on
    Android SDKAndroid SDKRealmRealmPouchdbPouchdb
    at

    We are building an offline-first Android SDK app. The solution we're working on runs on a mobile device in areas where internet connectivity is intermittent or does not exist. The applications needs to be able to collect data and when it reaches a home base or finds internet connectivity, we'll sync it with the host.

    We've heard Realm and Pouchdb could be a good solution, but we are curious if anyone has any experience with either or have another path forward.

    See more
    Gabriel Pa

    If you want to use Pouchdb might as well use RxDB which is an observables wrapper for Pouch but much more comfortable to use. Realm is awesome but Pouchdb and RxDB give you more control. You can use Couchbase (recommended) or CouchDB to enable 2-way sync

    See more
    NGINX logo

    NGINX

    113.4K
    5.5K
    A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.
    113.4K
    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 · 11.2M 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 · 290.8K 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

    64.4K
    1.4K
    Open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows
    64.4K
    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

    related Apache HTTP Server posts

    Nick Rockwell
    SVP, Engineering at Fastly · | 46 upvotes · 4.1M 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
    Amazon EC2 logo

    Amazon EC2

    48.3K
    2.5K
    Scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud
    48.3K
    2.5K
    PROS OF AMAZON EC2
    • 647
      Quick and reliable cloud servers
    • 515
      Scalability
    • 393
      Easy management
    • 277
      Low cost
    • 271
      Auto-scaling
    • 89
      Market leader
    • 80
      Backed by amazon
    • 79
      Reliable
    • 67
      Free tier
    • 58
      Easy management, scalability
    • 13
      Flexible
    • 10
      Easy to Start
    • 9
      Widely used
    • 9
      Web-scale
    • 9
      Elastic
    • 7
      Node.js API
    • 5
      Industry Standard
    • 4
      Lots of configuration options
    • 2
      GPU instances
    • 1
      Simpler to understand and learn
    • 1
      Extremely simple to use
    • 1
      Amazing for individuals
    • 1
      All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.
    CONS OF AMAZON EC2
    • 13
      Ui could use a lot of work
    • 6
      High learning curve when compared to PaaS
    • 3
      Extremely poor CPU performance

    related Amazon EC2 posts

    Ashish Singh
    Tech Lead, Big Data Platform at Pinterest · | 38 upvotes · 3.3M views

    To provide employees with the critical need of interactive querying, we’ve worked with Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine, over the years. Operating Presto at Pinterest’s scale has involved resolving quite a few challenges like, supporting deeply nested and huge thrift schemas, slow/ bad worker detection and remediation, auto-scaling cluster, graceful cluster shutdown and impersonation support for ldap authenticator.

    Our infrastructure is built on top of Amazon EC2 and we leverage Amazon S3 for storing our data. This separates compute and storage layers, and allows multiple compute clusters to share the S3 data.

    We have hundreds of petabytes of data and tens of thousands of Apache Hive tables. Our Presto clusters are comprised of a fleet of 450 r4.8xl EC2 instances. Presto clusters together have over 100 TBs of memory and 14K vcpu cores. Within Pinterest, we have close to more than 1,000 monthly active users (out of total 1,600+ Pinterest employees) using Presto, who run about 400K queries on these clusters per month.

    Each query submitted to Presto cluster is logged to a Kafka topic via Singer. Singer is a logging agent built at Pinterest and we talked about it in a previous post. Each query is logged when it is submitted and when it finishes. When a Presto cluster crashes, we will have query submitted events without corresponding query finished events. These events enable us to capture the effect of cluster crashes over time.

    Each Presto cluster at Pinterest has workers on a mix of dedicated AWS EC2 instances and Kubernetes pods. Kubernetes platform provides us with the capability to add and remove workers from a Presto cluster very quickly. The best-case latency on bringing up a new worker on Kubernetes is less than a minute. However, when the Kubernetes cluster itself is out of resources and needs to scale up, it can take up to ten minutes. Some other advantages of deploying on Kubernetes platform is that our Presto deployment becomes agnostic of cloud vendor, instance types, OS, etc.

    #BigData #AWS #DataScience #DataEngineering

    See more
    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 11.2M 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