Parse Reviews & Product Details

Parse is an open-source platform for developers building applications, with backend tools for user management, push notifications, and data storage. It is designed to simplify server-side development and reduce the need to manage the underlying server infrastructure.

What company sizes and industries is Parse the best fit for?

Parse’s positive reviewer profiles cluster most around small businesses and software companies. The strongest represented segments are:

Company size: Small businesses
Industry: Computer Software

How long does it take to implement Parse across a team?

Implementation timelines vary, with one to three months the most commonly reported time to go live. Other reported timelines range from less than a day to more than a year, and some teams did not go live.

Time to go live	Relative frequency
1–3 months	Most common
Less than a day	Also reported
Less than 1 month	Also reported
3–6 months	Also reported
Never	Also reported
More than 12 months	Also reported

What customer support options does Parse provide, and how do users find the overall support experience?

The support experience is mixed. Users value the available guidance and migration help, but also describe slow replies to issues and difficulty getting feedback when problems arise.

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Samuel A.

Senior Software Engineer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/13/2022

"Easy sockets to use realtime data"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Parse?

Fast way to connect mobile apps with server to show realtime data Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

Hard migrations data, when you want to add new values it could be so thoughtful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/11/2022

"Good service"

4/5

What do you like best about Parse?

They have good documentation for the understanding of the product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

Their support take several days to reply on issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Bjoern S.

Founder

Marketing and Advertising

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

9/19/2016

"Parse is being shut down in January 2017"

1/5

What do you like best about Parse?

We really enjoyed the ability to build small middleware solutions with Parse. It came with everything you needed: User management, database, SSL hosting, different client SDKs. We're sad to see it go Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

Parse was never production level reliable. We could only use it for scenarios that weren't business critical. I obviously also dislike Facebook's decision to shut it down. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Parse:

You shouldn't use it, as it's shutting down. There's no real way to become a new user of Parse. The current way would be to deploy Parse server on your own infrastructure, as it's been open-sourced. This also means that there are a few additional considerations here: 1) Does open source Parse server support all your use cases (i.e. there is no built-in job framework anymore). 2) what solution do you use to manage your Parse apps (Parse Dashboard has been open-sourced too, but is a separate product). 3) Where do you want to host it. Parse suggests a number of cloud-based hosts, we're currently going with Heroku. We've also tried running on Digital Ocean and think about trying to run on Azure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Parse solving and how is that benefiting you?

We could deploy custom software solutions at a much faster time to market. It was particularly useful to write custom middlewares that would move data based on webhooks from one system to another. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Patrick W.

Creative Director + Strategist, UX/UI/Experience Designer, Senior Consultant

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

11/8/2016

"Awesome, Simple Backend Services"

4/5

What do you like best about Parse?

I initially used Parse as an easy way of integrating push notifications into a native iOS application I developed. Its very well designed and easy to add to an application with minimal headaches. If you plug in additional data points, Parse makes it easy to target messages to specific users or groups of users that match certain attributes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

One of the best things about Parse is that it's currently managed and operated for you. In January 2017, you'll need to host the service yourself in order to continue using it (http://parse.com/migration). That said, it's still immensely valuable even if you have to host it yourself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Parse:

You'll need to setup your own hosted version of Parse if you wish to continue using it after January 2017. That said: it's worth it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Parse solving and how is that benefiting you?

Being able to push content to users and maintain a tightly integrated database in parallel is really valuable in quickly building and deploying a technology product. Parse makes it very easy to integrate push notifications into your application with as little complexity as possible or as much as you desire if you wish to push the feature further. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Leisure, Travel & Tourism

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/20/2016

"Technical debt that wasn't worth the tradeoff"

0/5

What do you like best about Parse?

User session management is one of the few things I don't loathe about Parse. Their docs are pretty well thought out as well. I didn't take place in the full implementation, but apparently you can get up and running rather quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

Most everything. Insanely long response times for most queries. We're talking at LEAST 1000ms for a single record query, even if searching by the objectId. The product is also being deprecated, so it was a forcing function of our migration off the platform. A lot of my dislike towards it might be misdirected from being a fan of SQL over a mongodb. It's quite costly for the amount of downtime we also experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Parse:

Don't waste the time and effort. It's being deprecated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Parse solving and how is that benefiting you?

We were solving the need of quickly spinning up an API/backend server as a service. It made getting off the ground relatively quick but cost us a lot in technical debt. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Antonello P.

Angular & Hybrid apps team coach

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/19/2016

"A new era of hosted services"

4/5

What do you like best about Parse?

The new "parse server" released GPL is a full fresh start for this project. Project like sashido (that I'm using right now) can help you testing Parse and if you like it you can host your personal parse-server Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

The big step backward after the open source release. For months users doesn't had any information about the future of this project. I think the next year will be the real start of parse open source Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ephraim K.

Backend Web Developer

Entertainment

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

4/11/2016

"Parse used as a backend for a quick iOS app"

4.5/5

What do you like best about Parse?

The best feature of Parse it the ability to do things quickly with little code in the app itself. There are a couple lines to set it up the the didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method, and then it is very simple to use in the rest of the app. My app only uses reads, not writes, from the Parse cloud, and I just want to pull all the data from a table in the database. I can do that by creating a PFQuery in one line, then by calling findObjectsInBackgroundWithBlock on that query to fetch the data as JSON asynchronously. It really is that easy. Parse has many other ways to request, write, and temporarily cache data, but it works great for me thus far as just an api to fetch data from the web and store in Core Data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

The biggest problem with data is the requirement to host your own database and parse server. This hasn't always been the case but since Parse is open source now, this will likely be the way going forward. However, the guides to do this are quite clear. The way I do it is host the Parse Server on Heroku and the data on MLabs. Both are free for the amount of traffic I have. I also use the Parse Dashboard locally to have an easy interface to update and add new data to the MLab MongoDB. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Parse:

Checkout and update the Parse CocoaPod often. Since the ParseServer and CocoaPod library are now open source, things are changing fast for the better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Parse solving and how is that benefiting you?

My iOS app's backbone is data on specific buildings and locations across the world. This data is updated quarterly and I need an easy way to ensure my customers have the latest data. Because this is a free app (TempleTrip on the App Store), I wanted a free easy hosting solution that wouldn't require me to write and maintain a lot of server-side code. Parse works great for me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Entertainment

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

11/7/2016

"Back-end tools for mobile developers"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Parse?

It's the best back-end tools for mobile developers that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

Parse will shut down and all users will need to migrate their applications to other platforms. They did open the application source code in order to allow users to perform the migration and release Parse Server. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alex S.

Intern

Management Consulting

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

3/14/2016

"A huge time-saver for bootstrapping development, but left us stranded when end-of-lifed"

2/5

What do you like best about Parse?

Parse's complete stack offering was the main draw. Its completeness was illustrated straight away when the documentation and 'Getting Started' docs were first read. This made me feel it was sufficiently solid to base our product off of.

It provided us with a foundation to build our unique logic upon. That meant we could avoid reinventing the wheel in so many instances, especially when it came to remote database synchronisation — easily the most challenging part of our app's requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

At first my primary dislike was how one-size-fits-all its approach to dev was. It meant our app had to be designed around Parse's development philosophy, rather than it fitting our's.

But a year on, obviously my biggest dislike of it was the way it was discontinued. Suddenly we found ourselves having to prematurely rewrite large portions of the app in addition to a whole new backend. This definitely makes me think twice about trusting another startup with the core operations of any future apps I write. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Parse:

Be sure what timespan you require the use of the product over, and then create contingency plans in the event that the platform is no longer available to you in the form it once was.

Don't let it be an excuse to not have knowledge / experience in the most difficult parts of the technology stack (such as database synchronisation and offline caching), as you may find yourself need to to rapidly develop a different approach when your original plan is no longer viable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Parse solving and how is that benefiting you?

Parse solved our immediate need for a backend, dramatically reducing the initial development time by several weeks. It cut our costs, but more importantly, cut the time to market.

The primary business benefit I see emerging from this product is the ability to prototype and deploy apps in a very short time span, therefore enabling far more experimentation to take place in the development and idea creation space. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Peter M.

Co-Founder

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

3/14/2016

"One of the best mobile as backend"

5/5

What do you like best about Parse?

Parse contains 3 things that are really useful, setting up the database, push notification to the back end, and the cross platform APIs to access these 3 things. On top of everything is their friendly UI and amazing documentation. Although these look like extremely simple features, yet no one has done it right. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Parse?

There are certain limitations with Parse, such as storing file is only at 10MB. So we had to build additional tool to store either on AWS or Azure and store the link of the file to Parse. But I think this is something they can do easily as part of the feature which would increase usage for the users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Parse:

Parse is shutting down, we have yet to find another software mobile as backend service that can replace parse. For now, we are still using Parse, and trying to migrate it out using their open source server version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Parse solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are building a video app, which allows users to cut videos and make their own version of multiple different videos. We realized the benefit is quickly built out our backend with Parse instead of spending additional resources when the product is not validated with market yet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.