To anybody considering Realm

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.
  • Documentation is nonexistent/outdated.
  • No easy way to cancel your subscription.

Not worth it.

2 Likes

Hi @Trunks99,

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  • Documentation is nonexistent/outdated.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.

Regards,
Stennie

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Hi Stennie,

Thank you for your reply.

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.

2 Likes

Adding more info as I get familiar with the documentation again: A lot of the code in the documentation is deprecated. Example: https://docs.realm.io/sync/using-synced-realms/designing-an-architecture-with-multiple-realms

2 Likes

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.

Good to see you back.

Yes, I agree. I’ll update this thread progressively.

1 Like

yes dont, their system is very buggy

@James_Tan1 I would disagree. We’ve been working with realm for roughy 8 years at this point and have generally found it to be relatively stable. While new releases sometimes need tweaking, the team is pretty well on top of that.

When adding a post or a comment here in the forums, vague statements are not generally helpful - providing details about what is buggy or what difficulties you encountered helps the developers refine the Realm platform and make it better for all.

And… replying to a post that almost 5 years old may not reflect the current status of Realm so if you’re having an issue, post your code, troubleshooting and the specific issue in a new thread so the community can take a look and address it!

1 Like

have you tested the reset password? was working previously, and now it just throws 404 error.

mind you, there are no admin tools to reset password for any user on mongodb realm control panel.
no tools to transfer project users to another project, even to clone.
mongodb chat support only entertain mongodb database , realm is left stranded with no where to report bugs

and i saw some forum reply is about 12months, or even non

look at this response

and this, no one replied in the end

@James_Tan1 Let me provide my non-employee, non-champion perspective:

Yes - it’s working for us. We generally use admin functions to do that but there’s documentation showing several ways.

I agree but having that in the console is a feature request (and really, should already be there)

Users are project specific so that makes sense. BUT if you do want that, it’s a feature request and that can may (?) be done though an admin function ( I have not tried it though )

I totally agree with this one - it often feels like us Realm users are ON AN ISLAND, which I have been saying for years. I am no longer in their Champion program so I don’t really have any input. Keep in mind there is a git page for Realm where bugs can be reported and the developers do see those. The Swift Git is here

I am pretty active on the Swift forums but the others sometimes are not addressed - but it would be great if there was more input from the developers.


My point being that saying it’s buggy is different than it lacking certain features you would like to see. You can always file feature requests as well

https://feedback.mongodb.com

its finally a nail in the coffin for realm

@James_Tan1 Yes. Depreciating a majority of product features and not offering a roadmap forward is in fact the final nail. It is time to move on to another platform.