Parse Platform is a free, open-source backend-as-a-service. See its history, features, self-hosting options and alternatives to Firebase.
Parse Platform began life as Parse, Inc., a startup founded in 2011 that offered mobile developers a hosted backend for data storage, authentication and push notifications. Facebook acquired the company in 2013 and ran it as a hosted service until announcing in January 2016 that it would shut down, effective January 28, 2017.
Instead of simply discontinuing the product, Facebook open-sourced the Parse Server codebase and client SDKs under the MIT license, allowing existing users to migrate to self-hosted deployments. Since 2016, Parse Platform has been maintained by an independent open-source community rather than a single company.
Parse Platform provides a schema-flexible object data store accessible through REST and GraphQL APIs, built-in user authentication with social login support, and Cloud Code functions for running custom server-side logic without standing up separate infrastructure.
It also includes push notification support for iOS, Android and web clients, file storage for media and attachments, and official SDKs across major platforms, all deployable on any infrastructure that supports Node.js with MongoDB or PostgreSQL.
The core Parse Server software is completely free and open source under the MIT license, so self-hosting costs are limited to whatever infrastructure you run it on.
Teams that don't want to manage their own servers can use commercial managed-hosting providers such as Back4App, which offer their own paid pricing tiers for running Parse Server on their infrastructure.
Yes, it is maintained by an open-source community (parse-community) with ongoing releases, despite Facebook shutting down its original hosted service in 2017.
Yes, the core software is free and open source under the MIT license; commercial hosts may charge for managed hosting.
Parse, Inc. was founded in 2011 by Tikhon Bernstam, Ilya Sukhar, James Yu and Kevin Lacker, and was acquired by Facebook in 2013.
Facebook shut down its hosted Parse service in January 2017 and open-sourced the codebase so developers could migrate to self-hosted Parse Server instead of losing their backend entirely.
Yes, it runs on Node.js with MongoDB or PostgreSQL and can be deployed on your own infrastructure.
Back4App is a commercial hosting provider that offers managed Parse Server hosting and is a major sponsor of the open-source project.
Google Firebase, Supabase, AWS Amplify and PocketBase are commonly compared alternatives.
Yes, it includes built-in push notification support for iOS, Android and web.