How To Choose the Best Backend Provider for your iOS App: Parse vs Stackmob vs. Appcelerator Cloud and More!

Which to Choose?

Now that you seen some popular BaaS offerings and had a chance to test how they work, it is time to evaluate each service and choose the right one for your needs.

All three of these are great options, and there’s no single right answer for everyone – you will have to make your own decision based on what you need for your app. The following points will help you consider which backend service provider is right for you:

• The most important factor here is to evaluate each service’s features and their usefulness to you — and your app! Preconfigured objects might seem attractive, unless your idea of what those objects should be differs from those of the service provider.
• Services that offer just “users” along with general purpose objects might initially seem more difficult, until you see that substantial flexibility comes with the user-based approach.
• Will you need a support agreement; and should you be paying for phone support? How accessible are the engineers if you need them, and what kind of user community support can you expect?
• Take a close look at the documentation. This is one time you should read it thoroughly, even though the sample projects have given you enough to get started! :] The quality, coverage and currency of the documentation will give you a good idea of how committed each company is to your success.
• Make yourself aware of the costs you will incur in using the service. This will require you to project your future usage for best case and worst case scenarios. Should you find yourself with 100 million users, will your app generate enough income to pay for the level of service you will require?
• If your app is going to require a paid plan from the start but it flops, can you afford that? Some services require you to contact sales before you know what these costs will be; don’t skip this step!
• Doing a search for the name of your service on discussion boards might expose interesting bits of information you might not have found otherwise. If you get no hits at all, how popular is the service — and what are the chances it will be around in six months? If all the hits say “it’s awesome” that might be a good indication – but pay attention to the negative comments as well!

Once you have answered all of these questions and written some proof of concept code, your use of the service itself will probably be enough for you to make a final decision.

TLDR? If you just want us to make a decision for you, we recommend Parse. Parse is incredibly easy to get started with, and for that reason Parse was chosen for the second part of this tutorial because it passes all of the tests with flying colors :]

Where To Go From Here?

Again, here is the sample project I’ve made for you with all three providers:

• Parse implementation
• Appcelerator implementation
• Stackmob implementation

I hope this article was useful to you to point out some of the options out there, and give you an “apples to apples” example to help you to choose between the different providers.

If you have any questions or comments on this article, or recommendations or thoughts on various backend providers, please join the forum discussion below!

This is a post by Tutorial Team Member Antonio Martínez, a mobile software developer currently working as an iOS Developer in London.