Firebase integrates beautifully with Ionic, and allows real time push, as well as offline caching. I've done it and it works great. You can also use CouchBase

Firebase integrates beautifully with Ionic, and allows real time push, as well as offline caching. I've done it and it works great. You can also use CouchBase (disclaimer, I haven't tried it yet, but have an app that I will be using it for in the near future). As a last resort, we also have an app that uses LocalStorage on the device to store an 'offline copy' of a database, and sync up when the user wants to. It works surprisingly well in this particular use case, and no need for any complex library. Just load up the local storage database when the app is launched for the very first time, and then whenever the user does a 'pull to refresh', it goes looking for the latest data from our server - if it cannot find a server connection, it fails gracefully.