AlertMedia vs. Firebase vs. Pusher

The AlertMedia platform helped us with several key events, including an F3 tornado near one of our sites and a police situation in a residential neighborhood near our office. With both events, the mapping features allowed us to quickly understand our associates who may be impacted/affected and follow-up with them in a timely and efficient manner.

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

As I told you earlier, if you just want to send regular push notifications to the app users, then Pusher shall not be your first choice. However, if you wish to make the app a little more interactive by making live changes in the app using Pusher and sending your user's real-time notifications, then you should definitely try it.

• Supports multiple countries with local or short code access numbers
• Very quickly sends multimodal messages simultaneously
• Provides good feedback for message sending, including options to resend to non-responsive people
• Very good Threat Intelligence options, including immediate notifications through subscriptions, and weekly TI summaries.

• 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

• Pusher allows live changes in the UI using push requests. We can also integrate it with the PHP source code.
• They offer 99.99% uptime, so we can trust on their services.
• Pusher works well along with the Flutter codebase, so we do not have to modify it much to work on cross-platforms.

Incentivized

• A build-in template for notifications about various activities (weather, injury, etc.) would help make alerts more systematic in both appearance and content.

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

• Not a good support system.
• Poor documentation.
• Date transmission encryption issues.

Incentivized

Easy to use platform. App is very simple and very mobile friendly

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

Support from AlertMedia has been ongoing and very accessible. Staff are consistently available and quick to respond. And I was developing an organization-wide training for this system, I called and spoke with a recruiter/trainer who emailed several training slides and helpful tips that I was able to convert into an online training.

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

AlertMedia slightly edges out Rave for general notifications; Plus, AlertMedia has a very robust Threat Intelligence features that I'm not aware that Rave has.

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

• Efficiently notifying associates of issues affecting our sites
• Timely and efficient return to normal operations when sites have been down and are resuming operations
• Hurricane briefings

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

• We had over ten thousand customer orders go through over the course of a year with no problems with this API
• There was very minimal support for this API which allowed us to focus on other priorities.

Incentivized