There is a lot of movement indeed in this space. Here are a few things that I think we at Nhost are doing well:
- Open Source: Nhost is open source. Some competitors are, too, and some are not.
- Infrastructure: Our infrastructure is set up to handle anything from side-projects to companies with hyper-scale. Each service, except the Postgres database, is stateless and can scale horizontally.
- UI: The Nhost Dashboard, although under development, will give us an edge in the next six months. Most database and backend dashboards look like they were built by engineers (without designers) in 1997. There is so much room for innovation.
- Tech: We're using well-used and open source technologies with little to no abstractions in our stack, from SQL (Postgres) to GraphQL (Hasura), to Node.js for Serverless Functions. Here I see competitors using either old technologies or building abstractions, forcing them to re-invent already solved problems, and forcing users to re-learn already battle-tested solutions.
- Workflow: We're not just an "infrastructure company." The goal with Nhost is to make developers as productive as possible. We have a CLI for local development and a GitHub integration that automatically deploys your backend (just like Netlify & Vercel). This way, our customers can focus on their business and users instead of figuring out development workflows. Here I see competitors either building custom in-house branching solutions outside Git or nothing.
In the end, I'm glad to see competition in this space. The winner of healthy competition is developers who can pick the services that best suit their needs. And that's the ultimate goal. To empower developers to build.
If I had to guess, they are not adverse to "Docker" the company but actually to immutable container images that are shipped from the developer and often assume that they can run as root.
