[html5apps] Parse or Firebase?

I have experience with both Parse and Firebase. In my experience, Parse is better when working with large relationship-based databases. (I.E. databases where multiple classes of objects are pointing to each other and interact.) In this system, it is easy to store a lot of data very succinctly, but working with this data is done via snapshots. This means that you can take a snapshot of the data, edit it, and then refresh the server with the updated snapshot. This is perfect for things like my delivery application where only one user is updating the orders on our server at any one time.

Firebase implements a model-observer scheme, and so it is much better for applications that are highly interactive. For instance, I have used Firebase for creating a real-time game of hot potato. The advantage here is that changes to the data on the server are automatically pushed out to all devices that have registered as listeners (functionality not available on Parse from my experience). This keeps all users on the same page all the time. The downside is that the database is structured in a hierarchal manner and doesn't have defined "objects". Rather, it is structured via key/value pairs where parent keys cannot have an associated value.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27716333/which-one-is-better-to-user-between-parse-firebase-and-aws-cognito