6 ms·

Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

69 points by kgraves 6y ago

Looking for a Firebase alternative that is ideally production ready and open source. Has there been any strides in this area and what is the current state of them in 2020? Thanks.

dm7 6y ago
https://supabase.io/ https://supabase.io/
wtfrmyinitials 6y ago
https://couchdb.apache.org/ https://couchdb.apache.org/ + https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/
danlugo92 6y ago
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for but: https://www.gun.eco/ https://www.gun.eco/
Wintereise 6y ago
Good 'ol AWS lambda might be an option (+other PaaS services as needed).
- dmd 6y ago
  That's kind of like saying a good alternative to air travel is "here's a pile of aluminum (and some machine tools as needed)".
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
habeyer 6y ago
hasura.io
- girishso 6y ago
  Yes Hasura looks like a serious contender. Uses Postgres as database and GraphQL interface. Supports real-time updates.
- wh-uws 6y ago
  building a side project with hasura right now. has been pretty solid to work with
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - wh-uws 6y ago
    one more test
digianarchist 6y ago
Is open source Parse still going? https://parseplatform.org/ https://parseplatform.org/
- xgenecloud 6y ago
  XgeneCloud: An open source alternative of Parse for SQL databases : https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud * Instantly generates REST APIs & GraphQL APIs on 'ANY' MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite & MariaDB databases. * Has a built in GUI to design SQL schema which auto-generates reversible schema migrations. * And lastly, the entire backend generated can be even deployed as a Lambda Function or GCP Cloud Function or Azure Function App! Demos are below : Happy to answer any questions [1] : GUI based schema designer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETEEcY4mmEg&list=PLhQvP2JTFbRi70kd_odHHJVpawZr9wXNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETEEcY4mmEg&list=PLhQvP2JTFb... [2] : REST API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEU-QvmwSKQ&list=PLhQvP2JTFbRi3SUBIsac37V6SITSMK0rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEU-QvmwSKQ&list=PLhQvP2JTFb... [3] : GraphQL API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaLIpXe1gb0&list=PLhQvP2JTFbRhwVE_-yJQiY32iHOP9zBJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaLIpXe1gb0&list=PLhQvP2JTFb... (full disclosure : Im the Founder of XgeneCloud)
- kgraves 6y ago
  How does Parse compare to something like Firebase or Supabase?
  - muzani 6y ago
    I'm not sure about Supabase, but compared to Firebase... Pros: Free, though you self-pay for server and MongoDB. Continuously improving. Much, much easier to set up for CRUD - I can get one up within half an hour. Web support seems better. Handles relations very well, whether it's one to one, many to many. God forbid you want to upload images direct to MongoDB, it handles that well. Integrates into some email adapters as well. The dashboard that accesses the DB is sexy and powerful, and has improved a lot since Facebook abandoned Parse. Documentation is excellent, far better than Firebase. And the data belongs to you even if Firebase shuts down. Cons: Self-hosted. Poor support. And won't land you any full yome jobs. Database is not real time unlike Firebase. Analytics and bug tracking is probably worse. Similar: Cloud hosted functions, authentication. I don't remember if Firebase does sessions, but it handles that too, on web and apps. In general, it's perfect for CRUD, especially on different range of apps and web.
xrd 6y ago
PouchDB is amazing. You can use their server side components and scale into couchdb later.
lukevp 6y ago
There really isn’t a competitor. Supabase is trying to combine OSS tooling into a somewhat similar offering but it’s not nearly as feature rich as Firebase. That having been said, most people use Firebase for real time DB and auth, and Supabase supports that now. It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases, or any of the advanced functionality of firebase. Pouch and couch solve the offline data scenario and live replication, but no auth story and the mapping of users to data is problematic (unless you build a proxy layer, there’s not an easy way to have some data be public, some private, and some shared). Realm is paid these days, I believe, and it solves the data replication, but again, no auth.
- __composed 6y ago
  Agreed and unfortunately Realm appears to have been acquired by mongo. No disrespect to the mongo team, but if we've learned anything from firebase it's that whenever a project like this gets acquired things get a little... shaky.
- kiwicopple 6y ago
  Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the result was a reduction from 27.9 seconds to 1.3 seconds. This is because we are building on top of Postgres. We also benchmarked our smallest servers yesterday - we were getting around 1200 reads/s on our smallest servers (FB was doing 1540 reads/s). We aim to get closer to 2K over the next 1 month and we'll publish the benchmarks. > It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases This is correct - it could take a few more months to get this out. Right now we're focused on stability/performance. I'm happy to answer any other questions
  - stephen_cagle 6y ago
    I am excited about this. Two questions: 1) Does scaling a Supabase app basically just boil down to scaling a Postgres database? Firebase (Firestore) claims they can do like a million concurrent connections & 10 megs per second of writes. Any idea of the scaling limits of Supabase? Totally understand if this isn't on the radar yet, it is not really a concern for most applications. 2) Do you have a built in authentication solution? One of the pleasures of Firebase is the built in authentication that mostly just works by enabling it. Happy that you are building an alternative to Firebase.
tarun_anand 6y ago
Firebase is an ecosystem of products. Which parts of firebase are your priority and what do you want to get done?
bribri 6y ago
apollo, AWS Cognito, and AWS Appsync
stephen_cagle 6y ago
Plug: I wrote a small clojurescript wrapper around firebase. You can try it out here. -> https://firemore.org/ https://firemore.org/ I haven't found another solution that can get you started as quickly as Firebase can. Most common complaint I hear from developers about Firebase is the concern that Google will drop support at some point. I can't fault that concern, but Google seems to drop developer products at a much lower rate than customer products.
pier25 6y ago
For the database and auth check FaunaDB. It doesn't have sync or realtime yet, but it's a much better database overall.
- exhibitapp 6y ago
  I second Fauna, it might not have all the bells and whistles yet, but they are excelling in providing a "serverless" database
pgt 6y ago
I'm hedging my bets by using Datalog and the Datomic protocol wherever I can: https://tonsky.me/blog/datomic-as-protocol/ https://tonsky.me/blog/datomic-as-protocol/ And keeping a close eye on Differential Dataflow: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/ https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/ DD is commercialized in Materialize: https://materialize.io/ https://materialize.io/ The solution is likely to arrive in the Clojure/ClojureScript ecosystem before it arrives anywhere else because tools like Datascript lend itself to this type of thinking, e.g. 3DF: https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df/ https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df/ The closest thing we have to streaming updates right now is FactUI, which uses the Clara rules engine, but it's IMO hampered by limitations of Clara and Cljs namespacing: https://github.com/arachne-framework/factui https://github.com/arachne-framework/factui The RETE algorithm is a less general solution to incremental updates. Zach Oakes is doing some interesting work with O'Doyle Rules: https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules
- pgt 6y ago
  For context, refer to Tonsky's essay on The Web After Tomorrow: https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/ https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/ Differential Dataflow + Datomic solves this problem.
trysomechai 6y ago
How about MongoDB Atlas?
Arkdy 6y ago
Biff is open source but "alpha quality software" https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff

69 points by kgraves 6y ago

Looking for a Firebase alternative that is ideally production ready and open source. Has there been any strides in this area and what is the current state of them in 2020? Thanks.

dm7 6y ago

https://supabase.io/ https://supabase.io/

wtfrmyinitials 6y ago

https://couchdb.apache.org/ https://couchdb.apache.org/ + https://pouchdb.com/ https://pouchdb.com/

danlugo92 6y ago

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for but: https://www.gun.eco/ https://www.gun.eco/

Wintereise 6y ago

Good 'ol AWS lambda might be an option (+other PaaS services as needed).

dmd 6y ago
That's kind of like saying a good alternative to air travel is "here's a pile of aluminum (and some machine tools as needed)".

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

habeyer 6y ago

hasura.io

girishso 6y ago
Yes Hasura looks like a serious contender. Uses Postgres as database and GraphQL interface. Supports real-time updates.
wh-uws 6y ago
building a side project with hasura right now. has been pretty solid to work with
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wh-uws 6y ago
  one more test

digianarchist 6y ago

Is open source Parse still going? https://parseplatform.org/ https://parseplatform.org/

xgenecloud 6y ago
XgeneCloud: An open source alternative of Parse for SQL databases : https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud * Instantly generates REST APIs & GraphQL APIs on 'ANY' MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite & MariaDB databases. * Has a built in GUI to design SQL schema which auto-generates reversible schema migrations. * And lastly, the entire backend generated can be even deployed as a Lambda Function or GCP Cloud Function or Azure Function App! Demos are below : Happy to answer any questions [1] : GUI based schema designer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETEEcY4mmEg&list=PLhQvP2JTFbRi70kd_odHHJVpawZr9wXNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETEEcY4mmEg&list=PLhQvP2JTFb... [2] : REST API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEU-QvmwSKQ&list=PLhQvP2JTFbRi3SUBIsac37V6SITSMK0rk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEU-QvmwSKQ&list=PLhQvP2JTFb... [3] : GraphQL API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaLIpXe1gb0&list=PLhQvP2JTFbRhwVE_-yJQiY32iHOP9zBJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaLIpXe1gb0&list=PLhQvP2JTFb... (full disclosure : Im the Founder of XgeneCloud)
kgraves 6y ago
How does Parse compare to something like Firebase or Supabase?
- muzani 6y ago
  I'm not sure about Supabase, but compared to Firebase... Pros: Free, though you self-pay for server and MongoDB. Continuously improving. Much, much easier to set up for CRUD - I can get one up within half an hour. Web support seems better. Handles relations very well, whether it's one to one, many to many. God forbid you want to upload images direct to MongoDB, it handles that well. Integrates into some email adapters as well. The dashboard that accesses the DB is sexy and powerful, and has improved a lot since Facebook abandoned Parse. Documentation is excellent, far better than Firebase. And the data belongs to you even if Firebase shuts down. Cons: Self-hosted. Poor support. And won't land you any full yome jobs. Database is not real time unlike Firebase. Analytics and bug tracking is probably worse. Similar: Cloud hosted functions, authentication. I don't remember if Firebase does sessions, but it handles that too, on web and apps. In general, it's perfect for CRUD, especially on different range of apps and web.

xrd 6y ago

PouchDB is amazing. You can use their server side components and scale into couchdb later.

lukevp 6y ago

There really isn’t a competitor. Supabase is trying to combine OSS tooling into a somewhat similar offering but it’s not nearly as feature rich as Firebase. That having been said, most people use Firebase for real time DB and auth, and Supabase supports that now. It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases, or any of the advanced functionality of firebase. Pouch and couch solve the offline data scenario and live replication, but no auth story and the mapping of users to data is problematic (unless you build a proxy layer, there’s not an easy way to have some data be public, some private, and some shared). Realm is paid these days, I believe, and it solves the data replication, but again, no auth.

__composed 6y ago
Agreed and unfortunately Realm appears to have been acquired by mongo. No disrespect to the mongo team, but if we've learned anything from firebase it's that whenever a project like this gets acquired things get a little... shaky.
kiwicopple 6y ago
Thanks for the mention lukevp. I'm the founder of Supabase. We started this year, so we definitely have a lot more work to reach feature-parity with Firebase. Since we are using existing OSS products though, we're moving pretty fast. We have made some technological decisions which we feel are better than firebase too. A developer sent us a note today that they converted a query from Firebase to Supabase and the result was a reduction from 27.9 seconds to 1.3 seconds. This is because we are building on top of Postgres. We also benchmarked our smallest servers yesterday - we were getting around 1200 reads/s on our smallest servers (FB was doing 1540 reads/s). We aim to get closer to 2K over the next 1 month and we'll publish the benchmarks. > It doesn’t, however, support offline use cases This is correct - it could take a few more months to get this out. Right now we're focused on stability/performance. I'm happy to answer any other questions
- stephen_cagle 6y ago
  I am excited about this. Two questions: 1) Does scaling a Supabase app basically just boil down to scaling a Postgres database? Firebase (Firestore) claims they can do like a million concurrent connections & 10 megs per second of writes. Any idea of the scaling limits of Supabase? Totally understand if this isn't on the radar yet, it is not really a concern for most applications. 2) Do you have a built in authentication solution? One of the pleasures of Firebase is the built in authentication that mostly just works by enabling it. Happy that you are building an alternative to Firebase.

tarun_anand 6y ago

Firebase is an ecosystem of products. Which parts of firebase are your priority and what do you want to get done?

bribri 6y ago

apollo, AWS Cognito, and AWS Appsync

stephen_cagle 6y ago

Plug: I wrote a small clojurescript wrapper around firebase. You can try it out here. -> https://firemore.org/ https://firemore.org/ I haven't found another solution that can get you started as quickly as Firebase can. Most common complaint I hear from developers about Firebase is the concern that Google will drop support at some point. I can't fault that concern, but Google seems to drop developer products at a much lower rate than customer products.

pier25 6y ago

For the database and auth check FaunaDB. It doesn't have sync or realtime yet, but it's a much better database overall.

exhibitapp 6y ago
I second Fauna, it might not have all the bells and whistles yet, but they are excelling in providing a "serverless" database

pgt 6y ago

I'm hedging my bets by using Datalog and the Datomic protocol wherever I can: https://tonsky.me/blog/datomic-as-protocol/ https://tonsky.me/blog/datomic-as-protocol/ And keeping a close eye on Differential Dataflow: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/ https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/ DD is commercialized in Materialize: https://materialize.io/ https://materialize.io/ The solution is likely to arrive in the Clojure/ClojureScript ecosystem before it arrives anywhere else because tools like Datascript lend itself to this type of thinking, e.g. 3DF: https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df/ https://github.com/sixthnormal/clj-3df/ The closest thing we have to streaming updates right now is FactUI, which uses the Clara rules engine, but it's IMO hampered by limitations of Clara and Cljs namespacing: https://github.com/arachne-framework/factui https://github.com/arachne-framework/factui The RETE algorithm is a less general solution to incremental updates. Zach Oakes is doing some interesting work with O'Doyle Rules: https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules https://github.com/oakes/odoyle-rules

pgt 6y ago
For context, refer to Tonsky's essay on The Web After Tomorrow: https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/ https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/ Differential Dataflow + Datomic solves this problem.

trysomechai 6y ago

How about MongoDB Atlas?

Arkdy 6y ago

Biff is open source but "alpha quality software" https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff