What's the difference between Instant and Convex?

stopachka 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would say:

We both offer a real-time queries out of the box. I am not 100% sure, I but think Convex also set up a multi-tenant database; so they can offer a good number of free projects well.

The way I would differentiate Instant:

With Convex you write your queries as Javascript functions. This means you have to do joins for example imperatively. With Instant, you can write queries declaratively.

As of today Convex doesn't work offline, and you have to write optimistic updates manually. Instant can run offline and comes with optimistic updates out of the box.

Both Convex and Instant support files out of the box. But with Instant you can write CASCADE delete rules, and you also get other services, like presence and streams.

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taoh 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Congratulations on your launch! 4 years of work is certainly remarkable perseverance.

The sync engine feature looks very interesting to me. There have been quite a few products available on the market today, but none has achieved a dominant share yet. So if this is your main strength, I'd like to see more demos built local first.

Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece.

	▲	stopachka 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you. > Curious if you considered shipping the engine itself as a standalone infra piece. We are thinking about supporting something like "Bring Your Own Postgres", which would allow folks to opt into just the sync engine piece. Right now we focused on the integrated system, because we really wanted to optimize for a delightful developer experience on greenfield projects.

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yoavshai 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me (and please correct me if I'm wrong, Instant team) the largest difference and a major source of frustration in trying Instant is that you don't have a backend. You get a real-time database with RLS and a sync engine. You don't get to run business logic. You don't get to write queries by name and gain the ability to migrate the schema as long as the query shapes match.

	▲	stopachka 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If by backend you mean functions, you are right, we don't support this just yet! We give you an Admin SDK, which you can run in frameworks like NextJS, or inside systems like CF workers. We are definitely thinking about bringing this as a first-class citizen.

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satvikpendem 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Convex is not relational