Parse is dead! — BaaS Research

Maybe not yet dead, but we know the date when the Parse is going to be dead. It’s 28.01.2017. Since the announcement from Parse team, the level of panic in IT society has raised. The Internet has many articles what to do now, what are the others mBaaS (mobile Backend as a Service) possibilities. We had the same in All in Mobile.

We are Mobile Agency — our motto says “Business First”. That lead us to check available tools whenever we have occasions — especially during internal projects. Why? We want to be able to advise our clients on every aspect of mobile development. This is why one of our inside projects was/is build on top of Parse backend. Now we see a need to check other mBaaS platforms and move there. We want to do a quick review of few mBaaS services.

Common denominator of our reviews

To make our review fair and trustfully we need to have some list of traits what we are looking for and a general knowledge what is important for us. We end up with the list of 7:

• Simple in use CMS — it is very important especially for MVP projects. We want to have a possibility to put data to our backend through a web page. We want to keep putting the data as simple as it can be (for non-technical users).
• User management — what kind of registrations are supported? Is it possible to create a user with e-mail confirmation?
• Possibility to create custom scripts in BaaS — we want something more then database from a backend. We want to be able to write some scripts to automate some processes, especially triggered by events such as create, update and delete.
• Push notifications — MVP or not, usually every app ends with some kind of notifications inside.
• SDK/REST API — our mobile app needs to download a data somehow. We will check how this process looks like on Android and iOS.
• Documentation — a level of readability of documentation. During our research, we find this point very important.
• Pricing — last but not least. How much will we pay?

Ready, steady, go!

To make it more readable, every review will be written as a separate article on medium.

Get ready for the first review! The Backendless!

The 2nd review is also available. Please meet the Syncano!