Well I love Firebase, but to put it naively, Firebase needs more advanced queries. Even more than usual because it is running 'far' from my backend, so queries from backend are expensive. For example, if there was a way to selectively bring back children of an object etc. I know there are workarounds (and I am doing those) but since Firebase is a DBaaS it needs to account for that when compared to other DBs.
Would you like to try out our alternative approach instead at Hasura.io? Parse like API on Postgres - with all SQL queries possible! We'd love to chat if you are still evaluating options @HasuraHQ. We are launching our public beta next week. Here is a short post of our take on the Parse shutdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994104
