Before you decide to use Realm, consider the following (I wish somebody would have told me this back when I was hesitating between Realm and other options):
Support is terrible. I’ve had a ticket open for 6 months, with one response to ask if I still needed help a month and a half in, and then nothing. Unless you are paying over $1000/month, don’t expect much help from support. And it’s not just me, look up posts from the previous forum.
Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate that your experience was suboptimal and I have shared this with the team.
Support is terrible
I agree that your experience was disappointing and below our expectations as well.
Over the past few quarters we have been ramping up our Realm support team and onboarding Professional & Enterprise customers to the MongoDB Support Portal, where questions are prioritised according to support subscriptions and SLA.
The Realm Support portal is nominally for operational issues related to Realm Cloud (the $30/month Standard plan), but there hasn’t been a strong gate on what questions can be asked there. Code-related questions (such as the one you originally asked) are better directed to community forums.
The support team has to prioritise issues according to support subscriptions, so while they will try to assist they cannot investigate every development question.
Documentation is nonexistent/outdated.
It would be excellent if you can provide more detail on what documentation you were unable to find.
We are aware that more code examples and sample applications are needed (and some of my colleagues are working on this), but specific feedback would be helpful.
No easy way to cancel your subscription.
Subscription is based on active instances, so the easiest way to cancel is to deprovision your instances. However, lack of clear UX for this is a definite oversight for Realm Cloud.
Realm product and development teams are currently focused on the upcoming launch of MongoDB Realm, which will provide a much richer experience for cloud sync and data management.
I hope you’ll consider giving MongoDB Realm a try when it is available. We have incorporated user feedback to provide a platform for the future and there will be better clarity for our support experience.
My colleagues on the support team will also follow up with you on your recent experience.
I think a lot of people have already provided enough information on what’s missing in terms of documentation. We need more example codes in general, and the documentation needs to be clear on key points like why we should use full-sync instead of query-based sync Especially since the latter is still documented and there are even example codes for it.
Self-hosting and ROS have been deprecated but are still mentioned in the documentation. It’s a simple edit to avoid your users being confused.
I haven’t really looked at the documentation or been on the forum since January after not hearing back from support – I’ve been busy doing other stuff.
Even after all the frustration, I’m still willing to work with Realm simply because moving to another service would require a lot work and I don’t currently have the time for that.
I’m sincerely hoping that things will change for the better with MongoDB Realm.
I’m back to working on my app, so I will do my share and provide you guys with feedback.
Just a note about doc: although I’ve developed with realm-js I have to peer to Java (Android) and Swift doc occasionally because some info is just for one platform and not on the other.
I think it would extraordinarily helpful to indicate what code is depreciated or outdated and maybe suggest a workaround if you have one. Some of the code in that documentation is actually still valid.
Yes, I agree. I’ll update this thread progressively.
It’s important to highlight in the documentation the difference between a Realm url starting with “realm://” vs “realms://”. It seems pretty intuitive for some, but still, what happens when you use a server url starting with “https://” and a Realm url starting with “realm://”?