Firebase Alternatives That Actually Work in 2023?
There is no doubt several BaaS or CSPs claim themselves as genuine alternatives to Firebase but in reality, it is hard to find a Firebase-like platform. Although Amazon Web Services (AWS) could be the most suitable candidate in this regard but I am not a fan of its card insertion policy and its little complicated interface.
Correspondingly, I heard everywhere about Supabase as a Firebase alternative but I think these could be promotional campaigns rather than the actual effectiveness. I used Supabase for one of my projects and I believe this platform should offer more built-in tools and community support is also not enough. Similarly, I found attractive Firebase alternatives here.
https://digitalcruch.com/firebase-alternatives/
https://dev.to/liyanacarr/3-open-source-firebase-alternatives-with-free-tier-1c79
Back4App looks interesting. But again, Back4app is only a few of Firebase features and you can't say it is the complete replacement of Firebase.
By the way, my reason for leaving Firebase is its vendor lock-in policy and closed-source nature. So, I need suggestions that should be about open-source Firebase alternatives.
Share your suggestions and experiences.
The main ones I’ve either used or looked into are: Supabase and Pocketbase (similar concept but implemented in Go). Agreed with your point about maturity and community support for Supabase. Although I find that it’s a really easy way to get started on a product. I’m able to prototype much faster. It has particularly good getting started guides.
Each of these tools has some best in class already existing providers. And each is a huge challenge to actually build, get right, and continue to innovate.
I would challenge any platform that attempts to deliver even potentially two of these. For instance, we are in the authorization space but offer authentication as well with authress since usually those end up going together. But because we are offering both that limits the markets we attempt to capture with Authress. We are a B2B2B (that is focusing on B2B companies), We provide hooks and integrations with cloud providers to do analytics, and provide unique identifier for push notifications. And while internally there is some ML processing for requests (for anomaly detection), we don't expose this directly.
I can't fathom trying to offer also Analytics, push, and ML, on top of what we have, it just doesn't make sense from a platform standpoint. There are tons more features and opportunities we have to integrate with our partners that focus on providing those things. And our integrations make it easy. The truth is, that at scale, you want to pull in exactly the providers that solve the problems you want, one massive framework or SaaS platform is going to be bad at everything and good at nothing.
You could also use the Parse platform as an alternative to Firebase. Its flexibility and customizability make it a viable alternative to Firebase in 2023.
Yes, the Parse Platform always look attractive but is it necessary to use any BaaS platform with Parse? Like I noticed Back4App uses Parse servers.
While it's not necessary to use a BaaS platform with Parse, using one like Back4App can save you time and effort in managing your app's backend infrastructure.
MongoDB has product called Realm. Did not had chance to test it yet, but seems, it has some nice features
Some potential open-source alternatives to Firebase include Hasura, Supabase, and AWS Amplify.
Why not actually use Firebase? It’s got everything you’ll need including some nice plugins for stripe, etc
Unless you are self-hosting your services, the issue of vendor lock-in would still remain even if you decide to go with someone else.
You won't have this problem if you are using services that are cloud-agnostic and open-source, like the PostgreSQL database.
I used Firebase before but later moved to Supabase, love the product so far.
can you share what built-in tools you speaking about?
I was referring to Analytics, push notifications, Firebase ML, authentication etc.
I believe without the ML, you can achieve everything else you mentioned with Supabase.
Some nativity and some with integrations
That's a lot to want in a single provider.
I would say Altogic if you know backend fundamentals: https://www.altogic.com/
This is the first time I am hearing about this platform among BaaS providers but I consider your suggestion.
This comment was deleted 14 days ago.