Parse vs Realm: What are the differences?

Developers describe Parse as "The complete mobile app platform". 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. On the other hand, Realm is detailed as "Realm makes it easy to build reactive apps, realtime collaborative features, and offline-first experiences". 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.

Parse belongs to "Mobile Backend" category of the tech stack, while Realm can be primarily classified under "Mobile Database".

Some of the features offered by Parse are:

• Store basic data types, locations, photos
• Update over the air
• Data browser lets you manage, search, and update content without writing a single line of code

On the other hand, Realm provides the following key features:

• Feels like Home - Realm’s data structures look like the Objects and Arrays of your language, but provide additional features such as: querying, relationships & graphs, thread safety, and more.
• Memory-Efficient - Realm is not built on SQLite. Instead, a custom C++ core is used to provide memory-efficient access to your data by using Realm objects, which usually consume less RAM than native objects.
• F-F-Fast! - Realm offers extraordinary performance compared to SQLite and other persistence solutions.

"Easy setup" is the top reason why over 111 developers like Parse, while over 4 developers mention "Good" as the leading cause for choosing Realm.

Realm is an open source tool with 13.4K GitHub stars and 1.74K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Realm's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Parse has a broader approval, being mentioned in 115 company stacks & 241 developers stacks; compared to Realm, which is listed in 59 company stacks and 51 developer stacks.