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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

Darn, I was just planning to integrate Firebase on a project today. Now I'm very hesitant to do so (if Google doesn't entirely pull the plug at some point, I expect them to package it in with Google App Engine—which I have zero interest in using).

Does anyone know of a good Firebase alternative which is either (1) still independent or (2) run by a company with a reason to maintain it?

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All of Google's cloud offerings are available independently.

You can use Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Compute Engine, App Engine, BigQuery, DNS, and all the APIs á la cart, and I'm sure the same will be true of Firebase.

In case you don't know, the APIs that used to be bundled with App Engine back when it was the only cloud product, like Datastore, have been unbundled over time. I assume remaining App Engine-only APIs like cron are under consideration for unbundling, but there's no precedence for an already unbundled API being bundled to App Engine.

Some good Firebase alternatives:

https://parse.com/ - freemium

http://backendless.com/ - freemium

http://www.kinvey.com/ - freemium

http://deployd.com/ - open source

http://firehose.io/ - open source

http://www.baasbox.com/ - open source

https://www.meteor.com/ - open source

Most of the Freemium options seem to be targeted at either (a) mobile apps or (b) enterprises (their homepages clearly target executives/managers, not developers). They seem to want to own your whole stack. We have an existing app, with just a small bit that needs to be realtime. Firebase is the perfect solution, so it's really a shame that their future isn't bright.

As for the open source solutions, I specifically want to pay someone money to solve this for us. We've been running ShareJS, but it's annoying to maintain and fix.

https://www.loggur.com is like Firebase on steroids, though only launched a few weeks ago. There is a lot to come: first thing being proper documentation for the REST API behind Loggur (should developers prefer to talk directly to it), and then hopefully huge strides in usability. But we need tons of feedback for the latter!

(Disclaimer: I work for Fanout)

If you want to add realtime to an existing project that already has a database, then I suggest checking out Fanout ( https://fanout.io/ ). We intentionally don't want to own your whole stack, and we've opened our code and protocols so that you're never trapped. Would love to get your feedback.

Parse actually seems pretty developer-focused. So does Syncano, except their free tier is limited. I believe they're changing that, though. Pubnub, Kinvey, etc. all seem to target more enterprise clients.

Also:

http://www.syncano.com (freemium)

http://www.pubnub.com (freemium)

http://www.socket.io (open source)

Apache Usergrid (open source): http://usergrid.incubator.apache.org/

Usergrid enterprise-grade hosting and support provided by Apigee (as API BaaS): https://developers.apigee.com/get-started

I came across backand - http://www.backand.com/ - they might be a good alternative

You might want to check out Syncano for real-time apps/data storage. If you're looking just to do just push notifications, check out PubNub. I believe both are independently owned. And yeah, bummer about the whole Google thing.

Build your own: http://procbits.com/2014/01/06/poor-mans-firebase-leveldb-re...

hood.ie or pouchdb might be what your helpful

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