Airship vs. EZ Texting vs. Firebase

Well-Suited for: 1. Mobile App Notifications: Ideal for targeted push notifications in apps. 2. Customer Segmentation: Effective for personalized marketing campaigns based on user data. 3. Event-Triggered Automation: Great for automated messaging based on user actions. 4. A/B Testing: Useful for optimizing campaign messages and strategies. Less Appropriate for: 1. Non-Mobile Channels: Less effective if the primary focus is on non-mobile communications like email or direct mail. 2. Basic Email Marketing: Other platforms might be better suited for simple, broad email campaigns without complex segmentation or personalization needs.

Incentivized

EZ Texting would be well suited for a small business that doesn't have the man power to be able to contact all of the leads they have coming in or who struggles to maintain communication with current clients at times. It would not be appropriate for a business who is looking to send phishing texts out to a large group of people.

Incentivized

Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.

Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.

Incentivized

• The marketing push notifications are very effective, and it gives us free hand to define different business criteria to target user groups
• The user experience or the message content could differ from Android and iOS, and this is a huge benefit for us
• As an Architect, troubleshooting an issue is very detailed and the time it takes to troubleshoot an issue is considerably less from our previous product

Incentivized

• I appreciate the detailed delivery reports.
• The support team’s quick responses are appreciated.
• The automation feature is incredibly handy for instantly messaging leads right after they sign up.
• The onboarding process is straightforward.
• Genuine customer inquiries show up in the inbox, organizing important messages in one place.
• You can avoid the email spam folder by using ez texting!
• Opt-outs resolve themselves.

Incentivized

• Analytics wise, retention is extremely important to our app, therefore we take advantage of the cohort analysis to see the impact of our middle funnel (retargeting, push, email) efforts affect the percent of users that come back into the app. Firebase allows us to easily segment these this data and look at a running average based on certain dates.
• When it comes to any mobile app, a deep linking strategy is essential to any apps success. With Firebase's Dynamic Links, we are able to share dynamic links (recognize user device) that are able to redirect to in-app content. These deep links allow users to share other deep-linked content with friends, that also have link preview assets.
• Firebase allows users to effectively track events, funnels, and MAUs. With this simple event tracking feature, users can put organize these events into funnels of their main user flows (e.g., checkout flows, onboarding flows, etc.), and subsequently be able to understand where the drop-off is in the funnel and then prioritize areas of the funnel to fix. Also, MAU is important to be able to tell if you are bringing in new users and what's the active volume for each platform (Android, iOS).

Incentivized

• The automated A/B testing winner selection and application should be added
• The flexibility of message shape, specifically incorporating transparency so messages do not need to be a rectangular shape
• Faster and more reliable servers around the globe
• Making more detailed use cases and tutorials to be followed can simplify things for users

Incentivized

• Drafts don't save well, seemed like I kept having to redo the same text because a draft wouldn't save.
• I want to be able to click and update users quickly, but there were too many steps to add/remove people from lists.
• The app didn't work if I used google SSO - i couldn't ever get signed in.

Incentivized

• Attribution and specifically multi-touch attribution could be more robust such as Branch or Appsflyer but understand this isn't Firebases bread and butter.
• More parameters. Firebase allows you to track tons of events (believe it's up to 50 or so) but the parameters of the events it only allows you to track 5 which is so messily and unbelievable. So you're able to get good high-level data but if you want to get granular with the events and actions are taken on your app to get real data insight you either have to go with a paid data analytics platform or bring on someone that's an expert in SQL to go through Big Query.
• City-specific data instead of just country-specific data would have been a huge plus as well.

Incentivized

We're excited about EZ Texting and what it does for us. We want to get more into automation with campaigns dealing directly with web sales so a more robust solution will likely leave EZ Texting as our event activation partner and only be used during select times of the year.

Incentivized

The interface takes a bit getting used to in order to know how to take advantage of everything. Some of the analytics that are available are particularly hard to find, so it's important to pay attention when customer support reviews everything, but everything I'd want and need in terms of Push and In-App messaging is all there.

EZ Text was very easy to set up and very intuitive. It does not take long at all to add your contact lists or to set up templates. It takes a second to get used to when it comes to sending mass group texts, but all in all, it does what we need to do and was easy to implement. We were able to do it ourselves.

Incentivized

I don't use the Firebase UI much, but rather connect it to GA4. GA4 has a great event model but the GA4 UI and analysis capabilities are limited. It's harder to measure product usage type of engagement but if you have the time and resources to leverage the GA4 to BiqQuery export you'll have all the raw event data you'll need for deep analysis, segmentation, and audience activation.

Incentivized

We have never needed to use the system and it be unavailable. They seem to schedule their server maintenance perfectly (at least for us!).

Incentivized

It works pretty well but sometimes things don't work the way you would assume, IE marking messages as read is not as intuitive

Incentivized

I have not had to interact much with customer support as I have been able to find the vast majority of the answers I'm looking for within their documentation, which I very much appreciate because it saves me a lot of time. Customer support has been responsive and helpful for the most part during the couple of interactions I've had.

EZ Texting "gets it"! When I have had something I needed customer service to help me with, they returned my emails and calls promptly. I have a smaller business and they came through as if I was a huge corporate entity. They really care about all sizes of customers!

Incentivized

Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.

Incentivized

The most important aspect of implementation was selecting a valuable keyword. When we first started using EZ Texting, we were able to grab a simple, easy word to use to connect people to our texts. That proved invaluable in our marketing and selling people on using the service. If we didn't have a good word, I would imagine it wouldn't have been as successful.

Incentivized

We've tested a bunch of different CRM tools over the years and Airship has been a winner for its functionality, features, cost, and ability to integrate with other softwares that we use. It has been great for SMS and mobile in particular. It could certainly be a one stop shop for CRM.

Incentivized

We chose EZ Texting over enterprise solutions because of it's ease of set up, ease of use, and low barrier to entry. We had discussions with other companies, and it seemed very complicated and would require a lot of set up on our end. We don't have a dedicated IT or marketing team. We are a small business. So those barriers were just too complicated and we decided to go with an easier solution.

Incentivized

Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.

Incentivized

We have been grandfathered into our old package, but I wish there were better package options offered now.

Incentivized

We haven't really utilized it for this purpose but it does seem like there are a lot of great options you can utilize.

Incentivized

easy access

Incentivized

• The ROI has increased more than approx. 50% (exact details to be confirmed) based on cross-channel orchestration
• Using push notifications alone, we have seen a huge increase in app engagement which was a challenge before to nudge users to get back to the App after initial download

Incentivized

• Customers, as well as potential customers, do not seem to have any issue, providing their phone numbers for text messages as opposed to receiving countless emails.
• Upselling items has improved considerably due to our ability to notify customers of new products and specials that we are offering in the store.

Incentivized

• Makes building real-time interfaces easy to do at scale with no backend involvement.
• Very low pricing for small companies and green-fields projects.
• Lack of support for more complicated queries needs to be managed by users and often forces strange architecture choices for data to enable it to be easily accessed.

Incentivized