MBaaS: 5 Solid Parse Alternatives 2021 (+5 More for Mobile Games!)

Goodbye, Parse, the father of all Mobile Backend as a Service (mBaaS). Now it’s time to find an alternative…

A bit more than half a year has passed since Parse has retired, leaving us just with their open source Parse Server. This has not been an easy transition, even though many tools emerged to meet the demand of mobile developers to migrate their data from Parse to alternative services, and the company itself has provided a database migration tool.

What we are certainly missing the most is an essential functionality for mobile app marketing – push notifications. Although several tools are providing this solutions separately, having a complete and all-inclusive CRM tool is something that all app developers are craving for.

So, today we are going to take a look at the best Parse alternatives 2021 – services providing solutions for apps database and push notifications.

Table of Contents

Parse Alternatives for MBaaS (2021 Update)

SashiDo

SashiDo - Parse alternative

As if Parse never left – SashiDo is based on top of Parse Open Source and equipped with extra features like Cloud Code, Background Jobs, LiveQueries, NodeJS App Hosting, Database Optimization and of course, Push Notifications. In our opinion, Sashido.io is one of the best MBaaS options in the market. Amazing product and lovely support! Sign up now and get 30 days free, we think it’s a very good alternative!

The guys from Sashido are already planning to release even more awesome app marketing features like Localization and A/B testing of Push Notifications, Automated messages and App Usage insights.

Pricing: starts from $4.95 /month.

Read more | What is MBaaS and why you should use it when building your apps

Firebase

Firebase by Google - Parse alternative

Firebase is a powerful tool acquired by Google (no surprise!) and providing Parse-like functionality to develop and test an app, grow and engage its audience.

Firebase is probably the easiest solution for Android developers as it provides an effortless integration with other Google services like App Indexing, Analytics, AdMob and AdWords.

It is offering various products to provide solutions to app development challenges: creating Onboarding Flows, customizing “welcome back” screen, Launch new features progressively, starting by a small percentage of your users as testers, Follow the user journey across device, Add chat to your app with Realtime Database and Cloud Messaging, Optimize ads based on user behavior with Remote Config, Analytics and AdMob integration. And even process third-party payments without a server!

Pricing: starts for free for 5GB file storage.

Kumulos

Kumulos

Kumulos is a self-proclaimed best Parse alternative, offering a robust and easy-to-use service with a good balance of price and functionality. Oriented at mobile app agencies, it allows clients manage their own app content through Client Portal.

Push Notification service allows managing push campaigns in-house or turning the control over to agency’s clients through a Client Portal, allowing them to manage their own push campaigns and see the results in terms of open rates, unsubscribe rates, etc. Through Kumulous’ white-labeled portals help agencies answer the most common questions of their clients about user base and location, engagement, performance in the app stores and more. The reports can be branded as agency’s and set for automatic sending.

Besides, Kumulos handles MBaaS setup and app management, allowing to build a server-side infrastructure for an app and avoid monotonous backend coding and setup. The ideal use case are agencies or developers with many apps, who want to keep them all within one easy and scalable backend infrastructure, or hook it up to the existing databases.

Pricing: for their services start from as little as $25 a month.

Backendless

Backendless Mobile Backend

Backendless provides all kinds of services needed to build and scale mobile apps: cloud backend, hosting to run NodeJS scripts or use just as a storage, API engine for scaling up, tracked usage analytics and a marketplace with different feature packs, code generators, etc.

At app marketing level, Backendless offers user management and analytics, geolocation messaging and push notifications. Push notifications can be published from web and mobile apps, developer console or a custom business logic. The core of Backendless services is in its APIs, and each of the provided APIs can be extended with customers own code to do anything that an app needs.

Pricing: starts from a free plan with 1GB file storage. Paid plans from $7.99 /month with a possibility to increase plan limits according to developers needs.

Amazon AWS Mobile Hub + Pinpoint

AWS Mobile Hub - Parse alternative

Amazon offers a great portfolio of services (multi-platform support, CDN, device testing, etc) combined in a single package tailored for mobile apps. It allows to quickly configure all the features needed for a mobile business, such as backend logic, data storage, content delivery, user authentication, messaging and analytics.

User analytics and engagement solutions are provided by Amazon Pinpoint. It allows to run engagement campaigns across multiple channels (push notifications, SMS, email), understand user behaviour and work on segmenting and targeting the right users. Advanced analytics allow to track the results of your campaigns.

Going with Amazon AWS Mobile Hub will provide you with high scalability and a great company of top apps, such as Airbnb, Netflix, Periscope or Tinder.

Pricing: Pinpoint is free up to 5,000 targeted users per month, 1M push notifications and 100M events. When using the AWS Mobile Hub, you only pay for the services you use, and each service has a free tier available.

BONUS: 5 Parse Alternatives Tailored for Games

  1. PlayFab – an advance mobile games backend, offering multiple integrations with external user accounts like Facebook, GameCenter or Google, managing in-games friends list, player segmentation and push notifications.
  2. Heroic Labs – a solution tailored for massive games, providing managed cloud and backend for multiplayer and social games of high user volume. Its open-source codebases adds flexibility and reduces development time.
  3. Kinvey – a great general purpose MBaaS providing cloud storage and push notifications.
  4. Kii – The company focuses on Internet of Things (IoT) applications in particular. Unity partner, it offers features like platform extensions, push notifications, A/B testing, geolocation and user analytics.
  5. brainCloud – calls itself “backend in a box” and offers pre-built features (multiplayer, matchmaking, achievements, leaderboards) to start working on a game without having to reinvent a wheel. Among the huge list of features that brainCloud provides, are push notifications, in-app purchases and promotion controls.

Final thoughts about MBaaS and Parse alternatives for 2021

There are many other great Parse alternatives in the market, focused on different types of services, be it MBaaS, app analytics, user engagement, hosting or open source solutions. We are sure that most of the developers have already made their choice, but we hope that this list will still be useful for new developers or those who are planning to change the infrastructure they are currently using.

Related | Top Push Notifications services

What alternative are you using? Tell us in the comments!

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6 thoughts on “MBaaS: 5 Solid Parse Alternatives 2021 (+5 More for Mobile Games!)”

  1. Hi Katerina, Thanks for the write up on Kumulos. I’d just like to add that we also offer Analytics, Push Notifications, App Store Optimization and Crash Reporting/diagnostics (as well as mBaaS) all powered from a single SDK – which gives users of Kumulos the most comprehensive range of services from one single SDK.
    Thanks again for the write up. Really appreciate it.
    Regards
    Bob

  2. Great article! However, I think it is also important to list some open-source solutions. For example, Strapi offers most of the features included in Parse. In top of that, you are able to add custom features because you own the codebase. BaaS are easy to setup, but open-source solutions give much more flexibility.

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