TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    DigitalOcean App Platform

    Score8 out of 10
    N/AThe DigitalOcean App Platform enables developers to build, deploy, and scale apps on what they describe as a simple, fully managed PaaS. Users of the former Nanobox, acquired by DigitalOcean in 2019, have been migrated to the App Platform upon Nanobox's end of life in March 2021.

    $5

    per month

    Firebase

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AGoogle 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

    Pricing
    DigitalOcean App PlatformFirebase
    Editions & Modules
    Basic
    $5
    per month
    Professional
    $12
    per month
    Phone Authentication
    $0.01
    Per Verification
    Stored Data
    $0.18
    Per GiB
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    DigitalOcean App PlatformFirebase
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    DigitalOcean App PlatformFirebase
    Considered Both Products
    DigitalOcean
    No answer on this topic
    Google
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    83%
    Would buy again
    19 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    19 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    91%
    Happy with the feature set
    21 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    83%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    19 Answers
    Features
    DigitalOcean App PlatformFirebase
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of DigitalOcean App Platform and Firebase
    Feature
    DigitalOcean App Platform
    6.8
    2 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Firebase
    -
    Ratings
    Ease of building user interfaces7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Scalability4.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform management overhead4.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform access control4.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration9.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment creation10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Development environment replication10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification6.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Issue recovery8.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes6.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    DigitalOcean App PlatformFirebase
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    DigitalOcean App PlatformFirebase
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.5
    (31 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.2
    (6 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (6 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    DigitalOcean App PlatformFirebase
    Likelihood to Recommend
    DigitalOcean
    I would only get into it if I where willing to pay for the support plan and getting some assurances from the team as to where they are headed. The platform itself is great and can save you a ton of hard work and money. but it's hard to be confidant in it's sustainability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Pros
    DigitalOcean
    • Hosting of serverless application
    • Hosting of load balancer
    • Hosting of virtual appliances
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • 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
    Read full review
    Cons
    DigitalOcean
    • The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
    • Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
    • The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
    • Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • 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
    Read full review
    Usability
    DigitalOcean
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    DigitalOcean
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    DigitalOcean
    It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small scale deployment and the process to setup an account and roll out your app via marketplace is easy and cheap.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    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
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    DigitalOcean
    • The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
    • The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
    • I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
    • Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • 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
    Read full review
    ScreenShots