Convex laravel and questions
New to convex, and excited about its possibilities. I am coming from the Laravel PHP world (my tech stack of choice is Laravel 12 + Inertia 2.x, Vue 3.x and Tailwindcss 4.x), which is amazing for building fullstack web applications.
I am curious about Convex because of the realtime functionality (esp the reactive nature of the database)
I have gone through the first part of the tutorial here (Convex Tutorial: A chat app): https://docs.convex.dev/tutorial/
Questions:
1. Can I use Convex as a full-stack replacement of my laravel server? Are there any things I cannot do with Convex, that Laravel can?
2. Am I able to self-host Convex on a Digital Ocean droplet, for free, given that Convex is open source? I am confused about this...how easy is it? Are there data / storage / compute resource limits, as mentioned here?: https://youtu.be/BPPThblvitQ?si=oPHGn1Z6qGYeVeJl&t=983
3. Am I able to use Convex to build a large-scale, production-grade clone of Figma or Miro?
2 Replies
Hi @Jason , welcome!
Answers:
1. We don't have a full Laravel comparison, but check out this Stack post
https://stack.convex.dev/full-stack-framework-fallacy
2. I haven't seen Convex self-hosted on Digital Ocean, but check out this Docker install video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFn27k58VkY&t=7s - Yes, you can use open-source Convex for free. Ref open-source readme here for any limits https://github.com/get-convex/convex-backend/blob/main/self-hosted/README.md
3. Yes, Convex is great for large-scale production-grade apps. We've seen Notion Clones, stack clones. Here's a video from Code With Antonio, who built a Miro Clone on Convex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADJKbuayubE&t=1s
Looking forward to see what you build!
Hi @Wayne thanks so much for the response!
1. I read https://stack.convex.dev/full-stack-framework-fallacy -
It presents Convex as "the opinionated backend" for TypeScript developers, but it doesnt compare Laravel in depth.
Let me ask a more specific question as an example. if I want to be able to do "Login with Google", using either React or Vue, is there sample code to do that, or will I have to write it from scratch?
Does Convex support session management, migrations, seeding, support for Stripe, full-text search, etc? I would imagine not, because Convex is so new...but are things like that on the roadmap?
2. I saw the Docker install video. Would love some more info on whether I can host this on a DigitalOcean droplet, because I'm not a fan of Docker.
More importantly, I am curious why there are limits with the community edition, if I am self hosting. Here https://docs.convex.dev/production/state/limits it says "We’d love for you to have unlimited joy building on Convex but engineering practicalities dictate a few limits. Many of these limits will become more permissive over time. Please get in touch if any are prohibitive for your application."
What does Storage limit : 0.5 GiB mean here? Is it the max size of each database row?
Also, isn't Bandwidth of 1 GiB/month prohibitive?
3. Good to know that Convex is great for large-scale production-grade apps. However, I took a look at Code With Antonio, who built a Miro Clone on Convex. His code is behind a paywall.