“In Google, We Trust” is the official motto of app developers. Adesh Verma, a software developer and a tech consultant, hosted an app on Google’s Firebase during the initial days of his project. His platform grew from a few hundred to a few thousand customers when he decided to move data to an SQL database. It was a huge revelation for Verma that he was stuck in a rabbit hole which seemed impossible to come out of.
Firebase has been a leader in the backend-as-a-service (BaaS) space. It offers various features such as analytics, crashlytics, performance monitoring and others. But, the most critical features that the app developers use are user authentication, database and server-side functions. These infrastructure pieces are hosted by Google Cloud platform.
Besides, it also provides SDKs for frontend applications like JavaScript, iOS, Android, Flutter, Unity and others. So, developers can access them without having to architect, deploy and maintain their own server-side which requires money, muscle and time—all. Since building a backend for hosting mobile apps wasn’t/isn’t easy, for many years, the only game in town was Firebase that provided BaaS.
There’s a list of developer-friendly features in the platform, but it still isn’t a complete platform. It has limited support for iOS features, unpredicted pricing, real time synchronisation issue, limited querying capabilities and above-all data migration problems.
Despite its flaws, Firebase had built its monopoly in the market. But, that’s not the case any longer. There are multiple BaaS, which are now encroaching the ground that Firebase held for many years.
Amazon’s answer to Firebase
‘Amplify’, a product of AWS, has a very impressive list of features that allow developers to enable analytics, authentication, Geo location, predictions, push notifications, file storage, data storage and add AI/ML to the front-end web or mobile application.
Amplify supports iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native for web development and integrates with popular Javascript frameworks like Vu, React and Next.js. Developers can use only the tools they need in an existing app or use them all together.
AWS Amplify also provides many tools and services such as Studio, Libraries, CLI, UI Components and Web hosting. With all these tools, developers can build the apps’ back-end and front-end UI, connect their apps to AWS backends and manage users hosted outside AWS console.
Amplify has been gradually climbing up the ladder to become the second biggest popular BaaS platform.
A backend-as-a-service (BaaS) is an extremely complicated product for any company to offer. To solve such a complicated problem, there are now other platforms which offer various solutions of their own.
Supabase: Database makes the difference
Supabase has been around for two years now and has core features like authentication, file storage and serverless function, but the most distinguishing feature is its database. It uses ‘Postgres’, an open-source object-relational database system. This provides several advantages such as flexibility in data modelling and freedom from vendor lock-in (developers can host a Postgres database anywhere).
However, there are certain drawbacks with the platform. It doesn’t provide website hosting features and its SDKs are only focussed on the web with the exception of app-based frameworks like React Native, Flutter and Ionic.
Despite being focused on the web, Supabase gains its popularity as it makes relational databases easy to work with. It provides developers with a browser-based tool to manage the data and integrates nicely with user authentication where they can implement low-level security policies to have access control over data. Postgres also supports GraphQL, a Query language for reading and mutating data for APIs.
While Supabase is trying to solve the problem of developers via Postgres, nHost is building a Firebase alternative with GraphQL.
nHost: Postgres database is also GraphQL api
nHost provides all the necessary building blocks for contemporary software, such as a PostgreSQL database, a real-time GraphQL API, authentication, storage, and serverless functions that let businesses run custom code. These building blocks are available for most popular front-end frameworks, including React, Flutter, and Vue. Additionally, nHost provides managed cloud solutions with options for professionals, businesses, and amateurs.
A project built on Hasura can take a relational database and turn into a GraphQL API. The UI is nice and intuitive. It allows developers to visualise all their database records in the browser. The most special feature of the platform is that the Postgres data is also a GraphQL API.
As mentioned previously, BaaS is an extremely completed product for any company to offer. In an effort to disrupt the monopoly of Firebase, different platforms are trying to solve the varied problems of developers. The attempts of these platforms are laudable, but it could also be interesting to witness if any of these platforms would actually be able to surpass Firebase in the future.
