If you want to have a local DB in the browser, and a remote DB in the cloud, your choices are basically CouchDB or a ton of pain reinventing the wheel. Replica

If you want to have a local DB in the browser, and a remote DB in the cloud, your choices are basically CouchDB or a ton of pain reinventing the wheel. Replication and syncing are hard. In other words, for the very specific problem they're trying to solve, I don't think there ARE a lot of alternatives except "abandon local storage, and work directly against a DB in the cloud".