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Comment by david-given | Hacker News Reader

The documentation links on the github page are broken; see http://realm.io to find out what it is. (AFAICT it's basically Firebase.)

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There are two products - Realm Mobile Database[0] and Realm Mobile Platform[1].

The former is, as the HN post suggests, basically a database for mobile applications which you can use in place of SQLite or as a key value store.

The latter combines the database software which runs on the mobile devices with the Realm Object Server[2] which runs server side to provide something like Firebase (disclaimer: I've used the Mobile Database but haven't used the Mobile Platform (and Object Server) yet).

[0]: https://realm.io/products/realm-mobile-database/

[1]: https://realm.io/products/realm-mobile-platform/

[2]: https://realm.io/docs/realm-object-server

What are the differences with firebase? There must be something.

The biggest would be the Realm Mobile Platform is not a service, but a server-side application, Realm Object Server, that you can run on your own alongside the mobile client SDKs embedded in your apps. Another key difference, is that with our Node.js SDK you can create a level of integration with any existing backend infrastructure that would be harder with Firebase.

No, it's (at least) as easy to use as Firebase, but it's much more powerful. It uses actual objects, not json. It's very close to manipulating normal objects in the language, extremely nice to work with. There are limitations, especially with the syncing, but it's by far the nicest database solution I know of.

We're fixing those, but they should be:

https://realm.io/docs/javascript/latest and https://realm.io/docs/javascript/latest/api

I don't think of Realm as being at all like Firebase, except from a very high level. Realm isn't hosted, it's an object database, until recently didn't do sync, and more.

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