If you are like me you are lazy and do not want to write a server and do backend database work when making a simple proof of concept. Then you realize that all of the platform is specific and expensive. Which one is the least bad? Which is the best? Share testimonials of abstracting away the backend vs building it out yourself
Thanks for mentioning Firebase. I usually write a web2py application because it's so easy and quick and all my data is internal anyway.
For e-Commerce apps I would suggest www.marketcloud.it which is a mobile-first backend as a service with JS, Android and iOS sdks.
I think of 4th option pretty valid as well. Specially now when writing a backend has become very simple. Things like @RethinkDB where creating a push based backend is really simple. And if you really like to get in there you can use something like Django-Rest-API which can have all the stuff you want.
Sorry of derailing this conversation. If I do have to use a mobile backend I would go with Firebase, why ? Really awesome user friendly API. I do most of my client side using Polymer and i really love firebase-collection component from Polymer catalog. It allows you to use the whole service from really simple abstractions. I hope someday other vendors will also build polymer components.
I personally recommend Orchestrate and IBM Cloudant. Both have a free tier, both are good for specific things but the stuff you listed aren't for big apps. They are for small applications with not much data. When you have some terabytes of data 1, they get veeeery expensive 2, they become very slow
But we can agree in something. The tools you listed have the best marketing :)
My company used Parse for a big project which involved web and an app in Android. It was going pretty well until more than 20 users started to test it at the same time. Then it started to crash, did not save data and threw a lot of errors caused by its limits. Most of the time it didn't save the data as we expected and didn't even throw an error claiming over query limit.
I strongly don't recommend Parse. It's good for a prototype and nothing more.
I didn't know about Stamplay. Thanks for mentioning. But unless my needs are complex I always tend to go with Firebase. In most of the simple prototypes we just need a data store and some authentication which is handled pretty well by Firebase. Sometimes I have also used Parse for simple Mobile prototypes (mostly with Ionic).
Daniel Naim
I personally use Backand as they are the only backend as a service that is tailored for my angularjs applications.