Branch provides a cross-platform linking and attribution platform, offering solutions that unify user experience and measurement across devices and channels. Branch powers mobile links and cross-platform measurement to more than 3 billion monthly users across the globe. It provides cross-platform marketing, engagement and measurement solution for over 50,000 apps — including Reddit, Buzzfeed, Twitch, Groupon, and many more.
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Firebase
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Google offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.
$0.01
Per Verification
MessageGears
Score 10.0 out of 10
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MessageGears is a hybrid email marketing service built around deliverability, actionable customer data, and audience segmentation and targeting.
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Pricing
Branch
Firebase
MessageGears
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Phone Authentication
$0.01
Per Verification
Stored Data
$0.18
Per GiB
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Branch
Firebase
MessageGears
Free Trial
No
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Our main platform is free to all. Some of the free products that most apps find useful are content sharing, custom onboarding, referrals and organic app search. We have specialized products (Journeys (Smart Banner), Deep Linked Email, Dynamic Ads and Data Integrations) which are typically priced by volume of a company.
Branch's tracking analytics are not as effective. Currently, Branch Links only show stats for clicks from different platforms (Desktop/iOS/Android, etc.). It would be important if there is a way to know how to collect and show more user profiles such as location, male/female, …
We used to use AppsFlyer but unfortunately, we found errors in their mobile app attribution reporting. Firebase on the other hand, is a basic tool that has a lot of features, but the features are not extremely robust - especially the attribution or funnel reporting. As a result …
Branch well suited: Branch links are perfecting for embedding into our email service provider (SendGrid), paid media channels (Facebook, Google, ASA), organic media (Instagram, Facebook, content marketing, referral) and push notification platform (OneSignal) to be able to evaluate actions taken from users that clicked on those branch links. No matter the data from these links, they are accurate and are easily exported to our database and CRM to determine ROI, and find weak points in our major funnels.
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.
MessageGears can be a solid, inexpensive email solution and you can be able to send millions of emails per year. In 2020, we delivered over 235 million emails at a fraction of what that would cost with any other email service provider. We worked with MessageGears on a custom solution with our database.
Click tracking: it integrated well with Facebook, Google, Clevertap, product, etc. to allow multiple stakeholders to use this one platform for tracking.
Sale attribution: it has a robust fraud detection and event deduplication in place to attribute sales correctly.
Smart URL: it offers different deeplinks to support basic user platforms, thus making the URL behavior smart and personalized for users.
Referrals: it's a ready-made platform to easily launch your refer and earn program, with all checks of fraud detection in place.
Social sharing: it offers various goats and cards for how a link will appear on various social media channels if shared, which is particularly helpful for marketing teams.
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).
Multiplayers redirection is important feature. In our marketing process for [our] Ace Tutor app https://www.acetutor.io, we have a referral reward campaign for which we want to aggregate clicks from lower level links to higher level links. For example, we created unique Branch Links for 10 marketing interns, and each intern wanted to create Branch Links for their own 10 delegates, the clicks of the Branch Links from these delegates would be automatically rolled up to the right intern's Branch Link, so we can make payment following the aggregation paths. Currently, Branch Links do not support this kind of multiplayer or multi-layer redirections.
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.
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.
Our situation is unique so I believe we are working on a semi-outdated UI which needs a tune up / version upgrade. Similarly, our custom connection means that we do not have access to the full feature set so I've never experienced MessageGears' best functionality
We have never had any issue with support response yet. In fact, they have a local POC in our city too, who routes the urgent matters to their escalation matrix.
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.
MessageGears support is always quick to respond when we have an issue, which is rare. Gail has been our main rep and she has been great. We don't have many issues so luckily, we don't need to lean on their customer support team much. That said, it would be beneficial to hear from upper management more.
Branch's links are the most consistent in the mobile space. They work across desktop and mobile, where AppsFlyer and Deeplink's didn't consistently perform in both places. Branch's measurement is more consistent across all customer touch points as well, which gives our marketing and growth teams the answers they need without any struggle.
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.
MessageGears doesn't come close to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We chose MessageGears based on how data was accessed. We never really got a good preview of how the system works or what was available, so we didn't know everything that it was lacking until we started using it.
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.
