8base Reviews & Product Details

I've been using 8base for a few years now and it's been an amazing choice for our backends. with 8base I was able to set up a database with a built-in graphQL server in minutes. The UI for managing the database, creating new tables and columns with specific types and relationships is simply fantastic, The UI for managing and creating roles is great and super simple to set up roles and permissions overall. The documentation now overall is pretty good as well, and I've only had to contact support a few times for questions a couple of years ago, and they have definitely improved the documentation further since. The price for the service is reasonable even for single small developers like me or for hobby projects. 8base support has been pretty great. Overall it's a fantastic service and I recommend it to everyone who wants to set up a backend as a service quickly.

My dislikes are very nitpicky except 1 thing. The only real negative I have experienced with 8base is that the login and register functionality for customers have gone down several times in the years I have used it. I believe around 5 times in total it was down for more than an hour. Each time I created a support ticket and usually got a quick response that they started working on fixing it quickly no matter the time of day. To my understanding it has only been the "loginWithEmailAndPassword" and "signUpWithEmailAndPassword" functions that have broken over time. Which you only need to use if you want to handle login/register on your website. However the default recommended login/signup method is to redirect the user to an auth0 login/register page, and then get redirected back to your own website after the user logs in. (I think this login/signup method is the one they have most focus on and that likely has been functional the entire time). --- When I first signed up 8base had a fantastic live chat support where you could talk to experienced 8base support members live to figure out issues. They have since removed the live chat and the only way to contact them is now the community forum they have, or a support ticket system. This isn't really that big of a deal since the docs are pretty great and I pretty much only use the support if things go down. But it was nice to have the live chat option.

8base allowed us to get an entire backend up and running in just a few minutes including a graphQL api endpoint that supports subscriptions. This likely saved us hundreds of hours, and many headaches maintaining both a postgres database, and managing database migrations and setting up an api server, building an entire role and permissions system and more. It has been a huge time saver, and provides an amazing UX to manage all this. It's also great for setting up a project quickly for small clients.

How easy is it to build and edit an entire backend, and not need to care about DevOps and the feeling that you can deploy something in hours that should last a couple of days

When I was new to 8base the documentation didn't help too much in more complex tasks like example authentication with OpenID and just because I found an old repo with this example I was able to replicate, Some bugs were found but always the support people are ready to resolve these problems

We were looking for a way to fast deploy a backend environment and just care about the frontend, a very good benefit is not caring about server connections, crashes, DOSS attacks

You get automatically created queries and mutations and resolvers are very easy to adapt to special needs

It restricts a bit the capacity with the DB I think at firtst, it would be nice to have ability to do SQL queries

helping people host concerts in their places and all the logistics involved

The thing I like the most is the GraphQL API

The way we have to handle commits, deployments and schemas updates. And the documentation.

It removes the necessity of having to create a API from scratch.

The ease with which data models can be created and interacted with. The API explorer is helpful for quickly building and testing CRUD operations. How there is always a way to build an idea with the tools of the platform.

The data views could have an option to double click on a field with a referenced relation and either take you to it, or show a popup with the information of the foreign, referenced element. The logs could be separated per function, as in, whenever I click a function name on the platform, I see a log of its executions and the console.log/console.errors that belong to that function specifically. Other than that, any improvement that would make the logs more helpful for debugging would be greatly appreciated.

Increased ease of managing backend operations and data modeling. The type "File" and how 8base handles file uploads is very useful and time saving. Speed of development is undeniably increased. Having most backend needs met by one platform is convenient.

It's straightforward to use and amicable for the new developer, the API explorer work well, and it has all the functionality that's needed to test the queries and mutations.

Sometimes it's slow and has some issues and bugs with migrations, but nothing that prevents the workflow, the documentation is very useful and has all that's needed, but sometimes it's difficult for the newbie.

The use of queries and integration with Graphql it's really helpful and the API explorer to mount the queries/mutations is a great and valuable feature.

Database feature set is great - managing tables and relations is very easy. Cloud functions work nicely and documentation is pretty good. As a newer platform its doing well to try and get feature parity with some bigger players whilst adding its own touch.

Pricing model has room for improvement, direct access to the DB would be a great addition and the Front End builder has a long way to go before it can match other players in the Low Code builder scene. More external integrations on both the back and front end would be great.

Easy access to a back end platform without the overheads of managing the infra. A lower effort authentication system that allows the use of external ID providers.

8base provides a simple platform to create an application back-end quickly without requiring a heavy investment in infrastructure, complex skillsets, or API construction. API creation is just as simple to develop and deploy.

Complete documentation for the platform is not immediately easily accessible by developers. To acquire some documentation, we had to open a support ticket and wait.

New mobile application development with a low-maintenance back-end. Back-end has not required any special skills. Javascript developers are able to be productive very quickly.

Super easy backend solution. I like the GUI for managing the DB.

Well, for the frontend; it does the eaisy things easier but the hard things harder Backend: would be nice to have some further development such as integration with zapier and such. Feels a bit dead in terms of updates.

It makes it so that I dont have to build and manage a DB with for example Prisma (which is also really good)

8base does its job in terms of being a good BAAS. You can set up your DB schema & business logic fast and troubleless. Roles and permissions management is also done well. With their platform, it's easy to manage any backend-related task. I'd also like to appreciate the fact that you can self host the product when your product needs it. Whenever we would face an issue, 8base engineers were quick to help us.

8base is lambda based, which brings lambda-related issues. It won't be easy to handle a huge load, even though it is possible with extra effort. Out-of-the-box logs are tough to work with, but self-hosted solution helps (AWS cloudwatch) They have their own gql transform engine which sometimes may be of an issue and without gql-to-sql transparency it can be tough to optimize certain requests.

It allowed us to define a data model, deploy our own custom backend logic and utilize GQL for client. 8base allows frontend developers to experience the fullstack experience with little to no trouble.