Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to something like Parse?

LoopBack is open source. It's way too easy (IMNSHO) to outgrow what Parse has to offer, and I'm never a fan of these black-box, hosted solutions.

I can make changes as I need, and I own the whole server application from the bottom up.

Exactly - Loopback = "Parse in an open source box" versus a black-box.