In light of the news that Parse.com is shutting down, we need to find an alternative. The Parse team have been great to support the community (they've Open Sourced the Parse server code etc). So there is a lot of discussion and effort being placed on using the Open Source code to set up a privately managed instance of Parse. This is fine if you have the time/smarts to do that professionally (or just want to play with it) but I don't. I want to move to a scenario where all the management of the infrastructure and services is taken care of by someone else and all I have to worry about is my app's code and any custom backend logic I need.

For info, my use case is pretty simple. We've developed a small Cordova (Ionic) app which uses Facebook oAuth and Parse user login. We use the Parse.User object to mirror data from within the app to the backend. Cloud code is used for a custom API (basically spits out JSON which is consumed by the app). Parse hosting is used for a simple marketing website and some static assets which is hit from within the app.

• MongoLab
• Firebase

I'm looking for a decent managed node.js provider. I had heard of nodejitsu and since their acquisition, it looks like they're pointing users to Modulus.io . I don't want to run my own node server if I can avoid it. This means I'm looking for Paas (Platform as a service) providers as a minimum rather than "Cloud Hosting" (like Digital Ocean).

• modulus.io
• Heroku
• Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
• Google Cloud
• Openshift

• Dreamfactory (on Openshift) could provide a much better way of managing the api. Node.js scripts can be run from the endpoints (I think).
• A couple of instances of node.js (plus a load balancer) which automagically start up when they terminate should provide decent uptime for the low volumes of traffic we have.
• Heroku seems to be "the big boy" in this space so the eco-system around it is more mature (freelance devs, plugins that work, tutorials etc).
• Openshift is great but the marketplace has a few things that are quite out of date and the web UI is generally a little less 'polished' than Heroku.
• Need to do more research into Amazon EB.

I haven't been using this in production but we know we're going to build it into a release coming in the next couple of months so I need a solution. I've previously looked at all the usual suspects like UrbanAirship etc. Will probably depend on the Core data solution I choose and how users are managed.

• UrbanAirship etc.
• Amazon SNS
• Google Cloud

I have been using keen.io for analytics (we need some custom stuff) and didn't use Parse's offering. I'll probably move to Flurry for 'vanilla' analytics.

• Flurry
• Google Analytics

I've created a stack of my current choices on Stack Share. I'll try to keep the stack up to date with what I decide to use. Helpfully, you can drill down into each category to get a list of alternatives.