top | item 24843664

Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

69 points| kgraves | 5 years ago | reply

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.

34 comments

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[+] lukevp|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] kiwicopple|5 years ago|reply
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

[+] __composed|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] digianarchist|5 years ago|reply
Is open source Parse still going?

https://parseplatform.org/

[+] xgenecloud|5 years ago|reply
XgeneCloud:

An open source alternative of Parse for SQL databases : 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=PLhQvP2JTFb...

[2] : REST API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEU-QvmwSKQ&list=PLhQvP2JTFb...

[3] : GraphQL API creation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaLIpXe1gb0&list=PLhQvP2JTFb...

(full disclosure : Im the Founder of XgeneCloud)

[+] muzani|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, I still use Parse over Firebase in all my "full stack" work. I used to teach Firebase database to polytechnic students, and most of them had trouble with it even when given months. Parse Server was very easy to teach, and nearly all of them set it up within a day.
[+] kgraves|5 years ago|reply
How does Parse compare to something like Firebase or Supabase?
[+] pgt|5 years ago|reply
I'm hedging my bets by using Datalog and the Datomic protocol wherever I can: https://tonsky.me/blog/datomic-as-protocol/

And keeping a close eye on Differential Dataflow: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/

DD is commercialized in Materialize: 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/

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

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

[+] tarun_anand|5 years ago|reply
Firebase is an ecosystem of products. Which parts of firebase are your priority and what do you want to get done?
[+] stephen_cagle|5 years ago|reply
Plug: I wrote a small clojurescript wrapper around firebase. You can try it out here. -> 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|5 years ago|reply
For the database and auth check FaunaDB.

It doesn't have sync or realtime yet, but it's a much better database overall.

[+] exhibitapp|5 years ago|reply
I second Fauna, it might not have all the bells and whistles yet, but they are excelling in providing a "serverless" database
[+] xrd|5 years ago|reply
PouchDB is amazing. You can use their server side components and scale into couchdb later.
[+] Wintereise|5 years ago|reply
Good 'ol AWS lambda might be an option (+other PaaS services as needed).
[+] dmd|5 years ago|reply
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)".
[+] habeyer|5 years ago|reply
hasura.io
[+] girishso|5 years ago|reply
Yes Hasura looks like a serious contender. Uses Postgres as database and GraphQL interface. Supports real-time updates.
[+] wh-uws|5 years ago|reply
building a side project with hasura right now. has been pretty solid to work with
[+] bribri|5 years ago|reply
apollo, AWS Cognito, and AWS Appsync