Stuck on Firebase? Here are some alternatives
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The Backend-As-A-Service (BaaS) market is becoming increasingly popular for businesses that don’t have the funds to invest in backend infrastructure or maintain the costs of hiring backend engineers. These companies provide backend solutions to complex tasks that would otherwise take a developer a lot of time to implement by providing the underlying code solutions to tasks like user authentication, push notifications and integrating of realtime databases etc. Top of this market is Google owned Firebase.
Firebase gained traction ever since it was acquired by Google in 2014. It has a myriad of services and the list of the services it provides keeps on growing. It’s ease of use and quick integration makes it ideal for even for beginner developers. It easily integrates with Android, iOS, Web and Unity.
While Firebase offers an increasingly sophisticated array of services, it is not always the easiest or most affordable option depending on your project. Below I have listed a number of other Firebase alternatives that are mostly open-source and each wanting a chunk of the BaaS market.
Supabase
Supabase brands itself as the Open Source Alternative To Firebase and is built on Postgres database that adds realtime subscriptions and a restful API without having to write any code. They have far less services to offer than Firebase but has a thriving community around it. They are fully open source and you can check them out on GitHub.
Back4app
Back4app is one of the best BaaS companies offering an extensive array of features to its users. You can easily create GraphQL APIs unlike Firebase which does not support it at the time of this writing. It offers both shared and dedicated hosting options. It is open source and hosted on GitHub as well.
Parse
Parse is the most used open source framework to develop application backends. It has a large community of developers who support the platform and it has been evolving since 2016. It is a great tool to develop applications quickly and has an affordable budget.
AWS Amplify
Amazon have not been left out behind in the BaaS market with their product AWS Amplify. It offers a wide range of services ranging from user authentication, hosting, push notifications, GraphQL support, storage among others.
It is also open source and hosted on GitHub.
Kinvey
Kinvey is a serverless app development platform tailored towards enterprises and developers alike. Kinvey is free for an individual developers and pricing increases on a monthly subscription for larger teams. They provide you with the option to use any frontend SDK of your choice while still providing you with backend functionalities that you require. They have several projects on GitHub as well.
Gamesparks
Gamesparks is a cloud based backend development platform for game developers. It can easily integrate many backend services required in games such as multiplayer, social integration, leaderboards among others to make your game more functional in the best possible way. These features make it ideal for building the backend for your game and easily integrate other components. It is also a company acquired by Amazon. Check out some of their repositories on GitHub.
Backendless
Backendless is a highly scalable mobile Backend-As-A-Service (MBaaS) platform providing several backend operations such as user authentication, push notifications, UI builder, file storage etc.
Heroku
Heroku is one of the best and well known Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) solutions out there. It easily integrates with GitHub and is a great DevOps tool. It removes the hassle of developers having to integrate hosting by removing the hardware server issues involved. Heroku makes the processes of deploying, configuring, scaling, tuning, and managing apps as simple and straightforward as possible, so that developers can focus on what’s most important: building great apps that delight and engage customers.
NHost
Nhost is a Google Firebase alternative but with SQL, GraphQL and no vendor lock-in. It is a Backend-as-a-Service built with open source tools to provide developers the general building blocks required to build fantastic digital apps and products.
I’ll be adding more companies that offer BaaS solutions to this list with time. You now have a wide range of choices to choose from when performing backend functions for your desired application. The choice is yours.
