Firebase Alternatives: Supabase, Appwrite and Nhost

what's up savannah and welcome back to a special video about back-end as a service solutions and especially alternatives to the all-known firebase in the past i've been a big fan of firebase and i still like the concept in general of a cloud backend but there are certain downsides to using firebase you're locked in uh you got only a nosql database you can't really uh see the internals and there are people who really got a lot of problems with the pricing and unexpected high builds so today i want to show you three alternatives to firebase which are number one super base number two ab ride and number three a platform called n host or probably nosed i don't know exactly and i want to show you these solutions because there's a lot of money flowing into the back end as a service sector super base got more than 30 million uh funding uh epride got close to 30 million funding and in-house got an initial 3 million seat funding a few years ago so there is a lot of money flowing into the sector and i'm pretty sure we can expect some cool developments in the future which is just great for us as developers because let's be honest if you're a junior developer or starting out building a website with javascript and html perhaps also using a framework isn't that hard but once you want to add user authentication file upload protecting data stuff like that it's really like a massive jump from building a website to doing all these things potentially even with your own backend and you don't even know how to build a backend or host it so this is really where cloudback ends shine you get all the authentication storage security and a bunch of other things out of the box they are different in terms of the technologies they use the databases they use or which exact functionalities they offer based on the maturity of the platform so we're gonna inspect the three solutions and in the end talk about which of them might be preferred in your specific situation but for now let's dive into those cool back ends [Music] okay first backhand we take a look at is super bass probably the most popular although epfride is pretty close to it uh superbase market itself as the open source firebase alternative right out of the gate the punchline against uh firebase also on github superbase is an open source firebase alternative we're building the features of firebase using enterprise grade open source tools and that's uh pretty much a great summary of what super base does and what it does differently compared to firebase so instead of having everything um behind the the paywall or everything is just the core of firebase you're not really seeing superbase relies on only open source tools now we're gonna see that this is the same for all the other uh back-ends that we check out as well so we have a postgres database uh which is also one main difference to firebase because firebase uses a document based no sql database in here you got a traditional sql database we got uh otherwise all the things you expect from a cloud backend so we got authentication and authorization out of the box you can get auto generated apis uh a cool rest api which is a nice benefit real-time subscriptions possible even with the sql database graphql coming in the future at this point also functions available uh both for database triggers and um edge functions which are pretty much cloud functions as far as i know file storage and of course a nice dashboard so from the outside super bass really just tries to uh replicate everything that we got in firebase in an open source kind of way open source project everything is open um and although you usually get started with superbase like you get with firebase you can actually also use the self hosting approach this is for some companies pretty interesting um and we're gonna take a look at this for the other beckons as well um i haven't done this by now but it's definitely possible so the possibility exists which makes this a pretty cool uh option in general otherwise if you're just a indie maker regular small developer getting started with super bass is pretty easy you just create your tables they even got some ah they got uh somewhere the sql editor they got some snippet so you gotta play around with sql if you wanna use super bass um yes there are certain snippets here that you can use like a select clone but of course that won't cover all uh all your needs of your application but those are pretty cool snippets um you have to learn a bit of sql you can actually also create the table with the table editor at this point so you can create a new table i can enable the row level security we're going to talk about that in a second um add all the columns and just do it through the ui that's possible as i said authentication of course all of them have authentication uh and storage out of the box so there's not a big difference between the different cloud uh backend in terms of general functionality so we always got authentication we got a database we got file storage uh most of them have some kind of cloud functions that you can run um and in terms of security they are sometimes a bit different so for firebase we are writing those firebase security rules which looks sometimes kind of strange for super base you use the sql row level security which looks is there something like uh role permissions um yeah i think uh no um where is it authorized role based yeah that's last i guess this is close to uh row level security um oh here we go as well create the different policies uh which user can access uh which data or which row it's kind of good but at the same time it's also maybe a bit complicated for new users there could be some more ducks about all of these things regarding sql because in general the api was the documentation they used to be usual they have a pretty good documentation right here uh i just can't find it because i'm an idiot this is the documentation uh they got a bunch of quick start guides um they of course have uh sdk so i create an application with angular ah there it is um so from angular they all look kind of the same they all got a great uh either js or even typescript package which you can use you the usage is sometimes a bit different how you generate the initial client or how you handle authentication but usually it's just one line to sign up a user rush to sign in a user the database usage is different between the cloud apis uh the cloud back ends so for super bass a query might look like this pretty close to our actual sql i think so uh that's the broad idea of super bass um in terms of the community i found super bass to be i think the biggest or second biggest so on github we have uh 31k stars a bit more and we got uh now that this is really important but close to 30k twitter follow us this is uh somehow important because um you need a great community for a platform like this because then you get faster support you get answers to your questions um so i wouldn't uh totally ignore this and super base is pretty great they are running hackathons they're pretty hard in the meme game basically every day they are posting some kind of meme um so they're pretty active on social now what's probably also important is the pricing uh you know with firebase it can be kind of unpredictable and you might fear getting a super high bill at some point because you're built for i don't know how many uh calls uh with super base you usually have a more predictable pricing and that's i think how they also want to differentiate from firebase uh mostly uh yes of course you can also self-host it in that case it's pretty much well i don't think you're paying anything for super base then please super base team jump in if this is wrong but otherwise they have a really predictable pricing in terms of the project usage which you can check out here again you can get started with for free and i totally recommend you check out superbase i have used it in a few projects and i really enjoyed it so far back in option number two we want to explore is ebride um i actually discovered epride recently because they got a lot of funding close to 30 million which really caught my attention as this is pretty much the same as super bass um so it is also still in beta um i like the super bass colors a bit more that's my own profile actually we can go to dark mode as well if you prefer that then it looks totally different so it markets itself as secure open source back-end server for web mobile and flutter developers um it's actually interesting that they mention flutter here and i think in the past i've seen even more focus on flutter so in general i think abroad as the name also indicates is more targeted towards the needs of mobile developers although we have a web in here um i feel like it's kind of well kind of targeting a bit more the mobile market anyway um again we got open source technology in the background and that technology looks like this can we do this a bit bigger so this is the architecture of the system if you want to see it and the interesting part about eprite is that you can very very easily self-host all of this so they offer to get started a simple docker command i i must admit i haven't used docker a lot like pretty much never before but i could install this and i was running docker desktop on my mac and i could easily install the upright platform it was really just a matter of minutes to set this uh initial console up which i found pretty interesting so if you're interested in completely owning your own data that makes sense um abfright might be your preferred solution as eperite is really about uh self-hosting uh at the same time i asked myself okay so how do they make money there's no kind of pricing up here but what i found is of course they are going for a cloud platform in the future as well so building with upright has never been easier others started with having a cloud platform and then later offered the self-hosting app right came from self-hosting and now offers cloud in the future so that means i'm pretty sure uh with app right cloud cloud hosting uh they will make some kind of money because uh if you got 30 million funding there has to be some serious business plan behind upright now in terms of um technology uh once again complete back-end solution for flat-heavy relic they're really targeting uh uh the mobile market here very strongly um in terms of technology you can actually use whatever database you prefer so if you check out the diagram again um that's completely up to you which database you use so you could plug in a regular uh sql database mysql or you could also use mongodb upright of course comes with the default functionalities for uh user authentication we got a rest api we got graphql api coming soon we got real time uh we got as far as i know cloud storage exactly we got cloud functions so pretty much the same like uh super bass or firebase as well uh what i found a bit unique about app right is um i think they're putting a lot of focus on user management that's also what i saw in i haven't started in a youtube video um where one of the developers was talking about it so they have a heavy focus on creating users creating teams um and setting up these things of course they got the old stuff figured out all of this um but having this approach of users and teams i think they mention if you want to do something like netflix so not in terms of uh real netflix functionality but in terms of the user management and the groups uh that's what you can easily do with app right so that's pretty interesting um again i really like that i have this uh dashboard here hosted on localhost all of this is my own data and i could easily spin this up on a digital ocean because you see him announcing one-click droplets on digitalocean ah brandon brandon was actually also in the video and offered me help on twitter so thanks again uh brandon for reaching out i found this a big plus for actually all of the three uh so brandon reached out when i tweeted something i had um the founder from superbase immediately reached out in the past when i was writing about them and i got some some swag for super bass and also the creator of the third uh back and and host what uh we will look at jumped into a conversation so all of them are pretty great in the community and actually i just saw that fright is a massive twitter following even more than super bass so um abroad and super bass although app writer wasn't really i wasn't really aware of app right um is at least at the same level of superbase in terms of community perhaps even a step further along so um in terms of pricing as i said there's no pricing because you can easily self-host it in the future you might be able to use cloud we have seen the diagram and then i also wanted to i don't know i like this page from brian uh not sure why uh great great page brian looks like a i don't know notion document anyway i found something where someone from the upright team left a comment so let me see so here it is upright is more about simplicity our sdks are simple now ui is simple documentation um use a part of app right or all of it heck go dig in our code or check out our open sourced functions we don't care we just want you to do more while writing less code and i found this pretty much to be true i think they're abstracting a way a bit of the uh other things that you can do that we've seen in super bass uh and tries to and apparent just tries to make this a bit easier i don't know exactly how well the security works so you can set permissions read access write access either for a whole collection like a table an sql uh or for a specific document based on user id team id or role um well i don't know if this also works like the super base rules uh which you can just define upfront or if you just really need to set this on every call but of course i also made a little uh example so again all of these uh back ends have a great sdk you can just import app right i found this code snippet um i don't know why we're creating this steady client but maybe they actually use this in other cases as well because actually they approach us pretty good um so with that in place again a sign up looks like this importing the api from my helpers getting the account and then calling create i can create a session to lock in the user or interacting with the database could look like this to simply create a document so again ebright super easy to get started they also got a cli um and really really good documentation especially once again focused on uh the mobile uh field we got web flutter apple android uh but of course you could also um target your backend directly from a server uh as you can see we got code examples in all the languages so really great documentation here big community very reactive community also twitter discord so if you're interested in self-hosting uh your backend give apprentice a try one additional back-end that i wanted to present you is enhost or nose i actually don't know how you pronounce this um but i saw an host how do you want to call it inhostnost uh recently because they also got a 3 million seed funding and because that initial page here actually looks pretty amazing they take a well slightly different approach uh with a focus on graphql and the technologies used so again we got serverless backend for web and mobile apps we don't need to manage infrastructure so nhost is again uh about uh they host everything for us it's not self-hosted like we've seen with app right we got pretty much the same features um only this time it's really just about using a graphql database but then we got file storage the functions we got real time and we got even some additional use case related things like image transformation on the flip uh payment with stripe integration coming soon of course permissions and authentication and even transaction emails which makes this a pretty interesting service with um a few use cases implemented for us so this could really be one of the um big differences because approach is well it's a great looks great but it doesn't cover very specific cases it has a bit about geolocation and localization but nothing really like this um of course uh it is about uh not managing your infrastructure here with n-host and about graphql user management file storage um with the cli you can also develop locally i haven't trusted this but i'm pretty sure it also works quite easily as this is one of the main features as well now disclaimer i've only used this for a very little test with in-house because uh a second thing i have to admit today after what was the first uh yeah well whatever first thing what but this one is using graphql and i usually just used a rest api in the past yeah graphql is cool and all of these and you can now flame me below the video i will certainly check it out in the future perhaps even with nhos um but so far i am really an uh graphql newbie anyway um we can easily create an application like i did and you can install it again there's the js package of course for us available in code it pretty much looks exactly like this so i created this uh a new and host client i can sign in i can sign up um or this is apparently how you request data from graphql i think i get the concept uh and i think i actually like the concept um so i'll definitely get more into this but this is just a very small example now in terms of general audience size we must talk about this in-house only got 2.5 k stars on github at the time checking out but it was usually among the trending repositories um and on twitter well it's lacking a bit behind but still this is a great start of 11k followers um once again all of them offer direct access to your discord channel and again the creator from nose also reached out uh johan uh thanks for your support and i think johan was also interested in some more ionic specific examples so that's pretty good news now again in terms of the infrastructure uh here's the architecture of nose we got the graphql and authentication based on the postgresql database and storage and lambda functions um storage related to s3 pretty much a very typical cloud setup and i think um there's nothing wrong about this setup um in reality if we check out the project uh we can go directly into hasura um once again i have news with graphql so i also haven't used asura but i read that setting up security rules within hasura is a lot easier than um with for example super base the row level security um but i can only see this it pretty much looks a bit like mysql clients or php my admin or whatever it was in the past uh but of course for our graphql database um besides that of course we got the user management here or we can set up everything uh we got also sign in methods like the magic link we got the file storage so everything in uh we also got functions of course uh which you can directly um deploy from your github repository so everything in here also looks pretty stable and good yes this is still in beta and it's a lot smaller compared and funding to airpride and super base but i think what we see here is a great beginning for another product um also of course based on open source technologies but this one with a clear focus on graphql and also the serverless part that you don't need to host this once again this in the end comes down to uh your preference so if you prefer to self-host something um this might not be for you but if uh nhos becomes more popular uh we might still see like a cloud or a later after the cloud version the self-hosted version in the future um if they get time for this but of course in the early stages you can't work on everything uh they're perhaps working on these things right now which might be pretty interesting they're working maybe in even more documentation because the documentation is also not uh it's a pretty small documentation compared to uh the other contenders but anyway if you're into graphql and want to check out something fresh which looks from the outside pretty interesting go give and host a try all right and that's it so far for the details about our three competitors to firebase now let's talk about where each of them specifically shines for super bass i would just say super bass tries to mimic very closely what firebase offers they are going through a list of features that firebase has and they're replicating them with open source technology so if you're only looking for a replacement of firebase superbase might be the thing you want to use plus of course with superbase you're using sql instead of the document based nosql firebase database so that is the biggest difference if you're focused a lot about privacy about data security about owning the data then i think app right got you covered because upright focus to me seems to be especially on self-hosting this solution i don't know exactly how they're going to monetize that way or if they're going to monetize everything through the cloud offering their plan for the future um but with app right you can easily spin up a docker container we've seen the one-click deployment and it's just too easy to self-host your back-end with abfried plus of course i think there is a tiny focus on mobile within abride and also on user groups user authentication teams and just managing that kind of users so if you're uh trying to just build a mobile application perhaps app right is a more specific solution and if you're big into graphql and net technology i think and host got you covered because they have a clear focus on this super bass and eperite might add graphql in the future but with in-house you really got that focus right now it looks good to me on the outside but we have to say of course it is the smallest competitor in that space it is still very beta and you know what happened to pars a few years ago so that of course could still also happen to super bass or to app right not only in host but that's of course always the problem you have with selecting a cloud back-end so be aware of the par situation but otherwise n-host might be small but still looking very very promising what i think is missing in all of these solutions are actually a few things that make firebase a great solution especially for mobile developers and there are three key things that i immediately jump to my mind number one push notifications a very common use case for all mobile applications and with firebase you get the messaging right built in of course they got a little advantage because google is in the background but i still think maybe app right could do this better with their focus on mobile applications so making it easy to send push notifications maybe that's also included already and i just haven't found it but otherwise every team maybe jump into the comments and leave your opinion about this number two dynamic links firebase offers this and i think it's a cool addition and it can be really helpful to segment your audience uh the users of your application um so dynamic links might be something for those solutions and finally for mobile apps crash reports could be a great addition again firebase is this big all-in-one solution which basically got everything covered but i think if you gotta focus on apps like app right perhaps adding something like crash reports could be that initial uh or the this additional little uh thing that gets mobile developers into your cloud backend finally there are of course many more solutions they're probably not as mature as the others but one is definitely a really great solution that is aws amplifier if you want to see more about aws amplify please leave a comment and i'm happy to discover it uh but of course also same for the other three platforms that we've seen if you want to see ionic tutorials about them just leave a comment below and i'm gonna make it happen i really enjoy testing all of these solutions and i think they have all come to a very mature position already just give them a try and pick the one you're most comfortable with uh if you're more into privacy if you're more into cloud hosting self-hosting really they're just tiny differences between them but overall all of them are a great solution for your next project if you enjoyed the video please hit the like button and stay subscribed so you get notified about all the upcoming videos and of course if you also want to build a great front end check out the ioniq academy which is my place to help you with everything about the ionic framework i hope you enjoyed this i will catch you in the next video so until then happy coding simon [Music]

Channel: Simon Grimm

Views: 15,877

Keywords: ionic framework, learn ionic, angular, ionic angular, ionic guide, cross platform, hybrid app, ionic for beginners, ionic course, ionic, cordova, javascript, ionic academy, ionic tutorial, capacitor, web development, mobile apps, mobile app development

Id: eeBDlHt1GxA

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022