Ask HN: The state of Firebase alternatives in 2020?

lukevp · 5 years ago

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

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

stephen_cagle · 5 years ago

I am excited about this. Two questions:

1) Does scaling a Supabase app basically just boil down to scaling a Postgres database? Firebase (Firestore) claims they can do like a million concurrent connections & 10 megs per second of writes. Any idea of the scaling limits of Supabase? Totally understand if this isn't on the radar yet, it is not really a concern for most applications.

2) Do you have a built in authentication solution? One of the pleasures of Firebase is the built in authentication that mostly just works by enabling it.

Happy that you are building an alternative to Firebase.

kgraves · 5 years ago

kiwicopple, really excited with how Supabase is coming along, definitely a need in the developer space to reduce reliance on Google services and Firebase is a big one, just a couple of questions:

1) Has there been anyone using Supabase in production?

2) I've seen on the website that it's currently in Alpha, If I was looking to use Supabase right now, I should expect breaking changes right?

3) Is a migration from Firebase to Supabase in the pipeline, this would certainly increase adoption.

Thanks for your work.

tjchear · 5 years ago

Is there/will there be multi-tenant support for auth in Supabase?

__composed · 5 years ago

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

Is open source Parse still going?

https://parseplatform.org/

xgenecloud · 5 years ago

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

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

How does Parse compare to something like Firebase or Supabase?

muzani · 5 years ago

I'm not sure about Supabase, but compared to Firebase...

Pros: Free, though you self-pay for server and MongoDB. Continuously improving. Much, much easier to set up for CRUD - I can get one up within half an hour. Web support seems better. Handles relations very well, whether it's one to one, many to many. God forbid you want to upload images direct to MongoDB, it handles that well. Integrates into some email adapters as well. The dashboard that accesses the DB is sexy and powerful, and has improved a lot since Facebook abandoned Parse.

Documentation is excellent, far better than Firebase. And the data belongs to you even if Firebase shuts down.

Cons: Self-hosted. Poor support. And won't land you any full yome jobs. Database is not real time unlike Firebase. Analytics and bug tracking is probably worse.

Similar: Cloud hosted functions, authentication. I don't remember if Firebase does sessions, but it handles that too, on web and apps.

In general, it's perfect for CRUD, especially on different range of apps and web.

wtfrmyinitials · 5 years ago

https://couchdb.apache.org/ + https://pouchdb.com/

pgt · 5 years ago

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

pgt · 5 years ago

For context, refer to Tonsky's essay on The Web After Tomorrow: https://tonsky.me/blog/the-web-after-tomorrow/

Differential Dataflow + Datomic solves this problem.

tarun_anand · 5 years ago

Firebase is an ecosystem of products. Which parts of firebase are your priority and what do you want to get done?

dm7 · 5 years ago

https://supabase.io/

stephen_cagle · 5 years ago

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.

danlugo92 · 5 years ago

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for but:

https://www.gun.eco/