Parse Alternatives

As you may noticed Parse will be fully retired after a year-long period ending on January 28, 2017. Most of us need to find an alternative backend service for our apps. Please help the community to find a great BaaS. Contribution guidelines can be found here.

###What features are we looking for?

• Data storage
• Push notifications
• Usage analytics
• Dashboard
• Social integration
• User Administration
• Cloud Code integration
• Multiple mobile platform SDKs

###List of providers

• Apiary A tool for helping you design the best API before having to write any code. Apiary lets you design and test your API with an API Blueprint written in a open sourced, Markdown-like language that defines your API endpoints and how they should work including a mock server, tests, validations, code samples and your language bindings. Apiary will also convert your API Blueprint into interactive, comprehensive documentation for your API that you can share with other developers. It also offers a Traffic Inspector that will show exact data for requests made on your API, down to HTTP level, and outline differences from API documentation, or even perform validations against your schema.

• AnyPresence The AnyPresence MBaaS is focused on simplifying the process of building enterprise mobile apps that run on many devices, without sacrificing developer flexibility. Users without much mobile experience or time can get started quickly, to assemble and deploy an app through a web-based designer. Advanced developers have access to the source code for all underlying components, to make customizations outside the platform or deploy server components on-premise.

• Backbeam Backbeam offers many services that you will use to build your web and mobile applications. Backbeam is also designed to help you in your development process, not only when your application is finished.

• Bit6 A service that provides realtime communication capabilities for your app. Bit6 provides a drop-in SDK that lets you add app-to-app voice and video calling, text, photo, location and video messaging. It can even provide integration with PSTN lines and SMS so you can make calls and send messages to landlines and feature phones from your app. The Bit6 SDK also handles all the identity management and user authentication and discovery through phone number, email, Google or Facebook. The SDK is available for iOS, Android and Javascript for web apps.

• Buddy A lightweight, fast and flexible platform for collecting and processing IoT data.

• built.io Built.io provides cloud and digital solutions to Fortune 500 companies and startups alike reaching millions of users. Our products and services enable enterprises to accelerate mobile app development, simplify content management and connect the business across the Internet of Things.

• CloudMine Data security & governance often hinders the delivery of mobile initiatives by presenting risks to organizations including privacy, authorization and auditability. Building compliant mobile systems requires expertise in constantly evolving regulations. These challenges make for a perfect storm of complexity within healthcare and highly regulated industries, leading to significant friction instead of innovation. CloudMine provides a turn-key compliance framework to manage this moving target.

• Fabric A new suite of cross-platform mobile development tools from Twitter that helps developers solve several common challenges. Fabric is comprised of all seven of Twitter's SDKs organised into three distinct 'Kits': the Crashlytics Kit, the Twitter Kit, and the MoPub Kit, covering crash reporting, testing before going live, driving downloads, onboarding new users, social features, understanding your apps’s growth and monetisation. It's also really easy to incorporate the tools using a Mac app that integrates with Xcode to walk you through the steps required.

• Firebase A backend as a service that provides an API to both store and sync data in realtime across all your clients. When data changes, apps built with Firebase update instantly across every device - web or mobile. Firebase-powered apps also work offline, data is automatically synchronized when your app regains connectivity. With Firebase you don't need to write any backend code - or worry about scaling that backend.

• Helios An extensible open-source backend framework for iOS apps from Mattt Thompson. Helios is built on the Rack webserver interface and is comprised of a collection of backend components that you can mix and match to provide features including data synchronisation, push notifications, in-app purchases, Passbook, Newstand, logging and analytics.

• Kii Today’s Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile projects require powerful connectivity, instant scalability, 24/7 availability and multilayer security. Kii helps developers and device manufacturers of all sizes meet their high-performance demands with an end-to-end platform optimized for building and running enterprise mobile and IoT initiatives.

• Kinvey An alternative backend-as-a-service provider very similar to Parse. Like Parse, it offers cloud storage, push notifications and custom business logic, but also provides an out-of-the-box implementation of Facebook Open Graph for apps that don't have websites.

• Kumulos The Kumulos platform started life back in 2010 as a mBaaS. It was built to make it easy and affordable for app developers to build, ship and maintain even the most complex and scalable apps. Since then we have dedicated ourselves to helping app businesses smooth their revenue streams and building services that deliver strong, reliable recurring revenues. Services that are easy to sell, are valued by app owners and keep you close to your customers.

• Let’s Encrypt A new certificate authority that's free, automated, and open. Let’s Encrypt aims to allow anyone who owns a domain (including this site) to use a trusted certificate to secure their server at zero cost unlike other CAs that may charge over $100 per year to do the same. It also includes a command line tool that runs on your web server that makes it painless to obtain a certificate, securely configure it for use, and automatically take care of renewal. Let's Encrypt is backed by some big sponsors, including Cisco, Mozilla and Facebook, and has just entered public beta so can now be used by everyone.

• Objective-Cloud Not exactly an iOS development tool, but it is an idea that is mad enough to get a mention. As the name suggests, Objective-Cloud allows you to run Objective-C in the cloud. You can develop your custom web applications in Xcode, deploy straight to the cloud and they handle all the scaling. They also provide an SDK that includes a custom HTTP handler for creating RESTful web services. Price tiers are very reasonable as well.

• Otto A new devops tool that automates the way application environments are created for both development and production use. Created by HashiCorp, Otto aims to be the successor to Vagrant by abstracting away the complexity of learning all the tooling required to develop locally, provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and secure applications, into one tool to handle all the aspects of development and deployment to any cloud platform. A great tool for iOS developers that need to build a backend service but don't have to time to learn all the tooling required to develop and deploy.

• Perfect A framework for developing web and other REST services in Swift. Perfect's primary focus is on facilitating mobile apps which require backend server software, allowing you to use one language for both client-side and server-side development. It consists of: PerfectLib, a module components and utilities for client and server including JSON encoding/decoding, cURL support, byte stream management, and more; Perfect Server, a backend server supporting FastCGI or stand-alone HTTP; and a set of connectors to add server side support for technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB.

• StackShare A site where you can discover the tech stacks behind some of the world's best software companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Dropbox. StackShare lets you see which tools and services they use, and how they're using them. If you need to set up a backend service to support your iOS app but don't know what tools to use, StackShare is the best place to start. Once you're happy with the tools and services you've chosen, you can share your stack for other developers to discuss and vote on.

• Telerik Telerik Backend Services (formerly known as “Everlive”) is another recent and feature-filled option. The backend storage is an object store, but you can create relationships between objects, upload files, store geospatial data (and query it comparatively to other locations for distance) and more. You can inject custom code — written in JavaScript – to be executed before or after items are created, read, updated or deleted. The user management features allow you to create users, assign roles, constrain permissions to resources and data, integrate with third parties like Facebook, Microsoft (LiveID) and Google or even your own corporate Active Directory. Telerik Backend Services support push notifications for iOS and Android, as well as email and SMS notifications. It’s worth noting that the management dashboard provides very easy-to-use tools to define schemas, manage users, create/edit data and test push notifications from within your browser. You also get usage analytics for database size, file storage, bandwidth used, push notifications and emails sent and HTTP requests.

• Urban Airship Urban Airship used to just provide the backend for push notifications but has now expanded into other services such as analytics, audience segmentation and Passbook support. The SDK is simple to implement and the free plan includes 1 million push messages per month!