I think one can go pretty far using Parse, and it gives you a lot out of the box for your mobile clients...but it definitely has its quirks, and you have to use

I think one can go pretty far using Parse, and it gives you a lot out of the box for your mobile clients...but it definitely has its quirks, and you have to use it in the right way. 1) Don't even bother with their hosted Cloud Code, spin up your own backend and use the webhooks. As of the JS SDK 1.5 you can finally run a node backend securely. 2) Push complex logic off the client and into Cloud Functions. 3) Put plenty lot of thought into your schemas before creating them. That said, there are a few big areas of need that I see that I hope the team will address: 1) Development/Staging environments are a pain, particularly around schemas. Tooling around migrations would help a lot here. 2) Testing tools leave a lot to be desired (I had to roll my own backend mock library for node, https://github.com/HustleInc/parse-mockdb https://github.com/HustleInc/parse-mockdb ) 3) Limited exposure of MongoDB feature set (e.g. aggregation framework) 4) Downtime (and notification speed / transparency thereof) 5) Security/ACLs leave a lot to be desired, particularly for complex schemas. For instance, it would be great to specify object-level access controls in terms of Parse queries (e.g. Users that satisfy a query built around the object in question).