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Building a language learning app meant I needed a backend that could handle realtime sync, multilingual support, and type-safe code. I didn’t start with Convex—I evaluated Firebase, PlanetScale, Supabase, Neon, and others first. Each had tradeoffs: Firebase felt disjointed and buggy; PlanetScale lacked international support; Supabase leaned too hard into SQL; and Neon made realtime too complicated. What made Convex different was how little backend glue I needed to write. Realtime sync just worked. TypeScript felt native. My frontend felt alive without hacks. It felt like hiring a backend team on day one. A year later, I’m still shipping fast—and glad I made the switch. This post breaks down what I found, what failed, and why Convex ended up being the best database for a modern TypeScript app like LanguageHopper.

Convex compared Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro to see which LLM works best for building full-stack apps with Convex Chef, the new AI Agent app developer tool. Claude stood out for its precise backend coding and function calling, while Gemini made impressive UIs, and GPT offered solid speed and value.

Agents rely on long-lived workflows, but when happens when they fail midway through? Here are the tools you need to manage correctness and reliability: transactions, idempotency, retries, durable functions, journaling, and state machines. The missing abstraction layer for agentic is durable workflows, which bring them all together.

Convex might look like just a database, but for modern app developers, it's a full backend-as-a-service platform that replaces the complexity of stitching together ORMs, caching, rate limiting, realtime sync, and CI/CD. In this post, a startup founder walks through how they used Convex to build ClarityText—an AI-powered chat knowledge base—and explains why Convex delivers faster MVPs, deeper type safety, and a seamless developer experience without third-party services like Prisma, Redis, or Firebase. Perfect for developers evaluating backend choices in 2024 and beyond.

New convex-helpers are available now for fetching streams of documents, merging them together, filtering them them out, and paginating the results. With these helpers, you can replicate patterns you may know from SQL: UNION ALL, JOIN, DISTINCT, GROUP BY, and WHERE clauses where index fields are skipped.

Convex Panel simplifies development by integrating Convex’s powerful dashboard directly into the dev environment, eliminating the need to switch between browser tabs. Built as a React component, it provides real-time logs, table editing, and performance insights seamlessly within your workflow. This tool enhances productivity, streamlines debugging, and optimizes backend management for developers using Convex.

Convex now supports a powerful MCP server that lets you introspect your deployment's state, run functions, and read and write data.

Learn how to self-host Convex, the reactive database and backend. This guide covers setup with Docker, Fly.io, and Neon.tech, plus pros and cons of self-hosting vs. cloud hosting.

Explore techniques to improve transaction throughput and concurrency in ACID databases by reducing conflicts and optimizing database reads. This guide covers patterns like Queue, Hot and Cold Tables, and Predicate Locking with clear examples using Convex, providing developers with tools to handle high-throughput workflows effectively.

The tutorial "How I added GitHub and npm stat counters to TanStack.com" by Convex Champion Shawn Erquhart details how Convex automates the integration of live GitHub and npm statistics on the TanStack.com website. It showcases data fetching, database optimization, and real-time updates through APIs, web scraping, and scheduled jobs.

Hamza Saleem shares how Convex simplifies building real-time data sync apps like Sticky by using the useQuery hook, where you can easily fetch and sync data, like sticky notes, with minimal setup. He explains how Convex handles challenges like syncing data, live updates, and user tracking.

A good set of values can be critically important in establishing a team that stands for something. This post outlines why company values are important, what characteristics good and bad company values have, and how to run a process to determine your company values. This applies equally well to a company or team or any other organization.

Learn about Automerge CRDTs for collaborative editing, syncing changes using Convex.

Mike, a Senior Software Developer and Convex Champion, built “Mike Bot”—a virtual chatbot on his blog that captures his knowledge, experience, and personality—using Convex as the backend, along with OpenAI and a custom React UI.

Convex Components enable an ecosystem of powerful building blocks to reduce the amount of code you have to write and maintain yourself. Geospatial search, Expo push notifications, LaunchDarkly feature flags, durable function workflows, and more.

Triggers automatically run code whenever data in a table changes. A library in the convex-helpers npm package allows you to attach trigger functions to your Convex database.

We're excited to announce the winners of the Zero to One Hackathon V2! Thousands of developers and startup founders brought their A-game, building some impressive fullstack apps on Convex.

It was my goal to create an API that both feels natural to Android developers who have kept up with modern application architecture principles, as well something that feels like a natural fit in the Convex ecosystem.

Even though Convex supports the creation of cron jobs out of the box, until now, we've only supported static jobs. With user space crons, we now support the programmatic definition of crons at runtime.

Log streams like Axiom and Datadog can be used to provide powerful querying and alerting on logs and errors from your Convex functions, helping with debugging issues when they come up and providing early insights to detect smaller issues before they become bigger. This article covers how to do the several common things with either Axiom or Datadog hooked up as a Convex log stream including filtering to a request, logging structured metadata, and visualizing usage.

By leveraging HTTP actions with streaming, this chat app balances real-time responsiveness with efficient bandwidth usage. Users receive character-by-character updates to their own responses directly from ChatGPT, while other users see periodic updates, minimizing database bandwidth.

A cache is a non-authoritative representation of data maintained for performance reasons. Find out what these words mean and when you should care about them here.

Learn how to use Auth.js with your Next.js server and Convex backend to build a full-featured authentication system.

Online migrations in Convex using mutations, including a Convex Component to manage them.

Learn about best practices for testing your full-stack apps - running on Convex or elsewhere!

Read this article to learn how you can build our open-source backend from source.

By setting up dedicated tools, you can get actionable data to help understanding errors, performance, user behavior and allow you respond quickly when things change.

Convex recently released an open source version of the backend. We can use this to unit test Convex functions by running them with a local backend. These tests will work by running a backend locally, pushing your code, and using the `ConvexClient` to execute queries and mutations from your favorite testing framework and asserting on the results.

Step by step guide to take a file URI provided by Expo media APIs and upload it to Convex in React Native.

As your app grows from tens to hundreds to thousands of users, there are some techniques that will keep your database queries snappy and efficient. I’ve put together a short list of the most common techniques used by teams scaling on Convex.

Advice and resources for session tracking per-tab or per-browser via localStorage / sessionStorage using React Context, hooks, and some utilities to make your life easier.

A few more advanced techniques & helpers to further reduce duplication and accelerate your Convex workflow.

We hosted a hackathon for building features on top of a Notion clone created by CodeWithAntonio. Here are the results.

Syncing your Pagerduty instance with Slack is a good way to stay on top of your on-call schedule. We cover syncing Pagerduty information with a Slack channel.

In this second post in our series, we’ll build an AI-powered chat interface using LangChain and its new Convex integration.

Now that we've launched Preview Deployments on Convex, you can test out backend changes easier than ever. But you may want to seed your project with data first, so let's go over how to do that.

It's never been a better time to make your own town of AIs.

Learn how to build a full stack app with authentication without any third-party auth providers, using Convex and the Lucia library.

Pinecone and Convex are a good match when you're looking to build an application that leverages embeddings and also has application data.

Is your project in Airtable ready for more code and less no-code? I’ve published some code to help you migrate your data into Convex.

In this post we’ll look at some patterns for structuring relationships in the Convex database.

Did you know you can use the Convex Dashboard to run functions, enter seed data, filter & delete data, upload files, and more?

How to store multiple personalities Convex and provide them to the chatGPT API, enabling changing personalities mid-conversation. This is a follow-up to Building a full-stack ChatGPT app.

Reactive backends like Convex make building live-updating apps a cinch, but default behavior might be too reactive for some use cases. Not to worry! Let’s fine-tune the reactive dataflow of a Convex + React app to deliver a better UX.

Implement asynchronous job patterns using a table to track progress. Fire-and-forget, cancelation, timeouts, and more.

Use Convex to fetch an image from OpenAI’s image generation service based on a user-provided prompt.

An approach to server-persisted session data with Convex, wrapping your server functions and storing a session ID on the client.

Using wrapper functions like withUser can help you organize your code into middleware-like blocks that you can compose to keep your function logic concise.

When your database supports ACID semantics, you're free to write code the intuitive way and ignore the complexities of concurrency and failure.

For write-heavy applications, use single flighting to dynamically throttle requests. See how we implement this with React hooks for Convex.

The serverless movement has eliminated so many problems but it has left application developers with the hardest one of all: managing distributed state.

You don’t have to worry about the platform locking you into a decision that seems convenient at first but is a headache to deal with later.

Relational databases are powerful tools for persisting data, but using them to build interactive web apps requires a lot of work. A web app architecture built on a relational database is an entire cluster of databases, backends, caching nodes, and Pub/Sub servers. And even after you invest in all of that infrastructure you'll still need to explicitly define your database schema upfront and write cumbersome SQL queries. At Convex we believe that web developers shouldn't have to worry about any of this. We can handle the servers, caching, and reactivity and you can focus on your product.