A Backend as a Service couples a basic data store with expressive user provisioning and authentication tools. A BaaS that is optimized for mobile is called Mobile BaaS or MBaaS. The best use case for a BaaS is when data will only reside on either the device or the browser and the BaaS itself, with nothing in between. A BaaS does not have any backend processing abilities, so it’s not a good fit for data crunching or processing events like handling a batch of daily claims.<p>A Platform as a Service is something where you would deploy entire application architecture. The full stack, from application code to database structure to backend workers, is deployed to your little slice of the cloud. That slice, at the infrastructure layer (networking and OS levels), is managed by the PaaS provider. So, for a developer, PaaS is a container that takes the code or configuration as input and emits the URL of the application.<p>But when you have used Parse all these days you would know how easy it was to develop and maintain apps. It would be probably a little uncomfortable to go for any of the above as they only provide a part of what Parse hosting service can provide you. Using different services for different tasks is not what you would want to buy when all of them are available in one place.